


The More Things Change...

by Rori_Teagan



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-20
Updated: 2013-07-20
Packaged: 2017-12-20 18:56:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/890693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rori_Teagan/pseuds/Rori_Teagan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me.” ~ Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children). Come Heaven or Hell Sam and Dean are two halves of the same whole and there’s no force supernatural or not that can keep them divided. So what exactly is a butterfly effect that always ends in the same place?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The More Things Change...

**Author's Note:**

> After many years of just being a voyeur this is my first ride at this rodeo. I can't begin to say how excited I am. Thank you, moderators, commentors, participators, everyone who made this an awesome fest - let's keep it up for many years to come. Especially thanks to my artist Ladytiferet who chose me at the eleventh hour when I'd feared I'd be the one sad lonely author to not find her artist. Also a gigantic sincere sloppy thanks to ashtraythief! Without you this fic would be full of plot holes so large I could sink the Titanic through it. Stacy, as always, my first born is yours. Just say the word. :) Finally, I feel like bigbang ate my soul (in a happy dizzy omfg way) but I'd be remiss if I didn't brag my debut novel will be coming out this September at Sonadoebooks.com They're a great resource for writers and are still accepting submissions, so if you don't go for me, go anyway. ;)
> 
> Also: I now have work available on Amazon. Inexpensive, fun, sexy. Copy/Paste url to view: 
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/author/simone
> 
> or search under Simone Millien. Also, I'm now taking requests.

“Even on the worst day there’s always hope for joy”

 

_When you boil it down into its essence, removing all the sci-fi special effect features and the dramatic do or die action stunts…it’s a love story is what it is. So, yeah, okay, the details were hammered out long before the key players ever came into existence, and I guess in a way that would prompt some to say the fix was in. But the way I view it is it was more of a matter of personalities. Souls. The stuff that made Angelina and Billy Bob fizzle despite the blood vials but kept her and Brad going strong a decade later. It’s a matter of matching, and wanting and a whole helluva lot of stubborn. Betrayal, Loyalty, Anger, Reverence, every step forward linked them back around into the circle of their own creation. It’s not so much Destiny, really, it’s human beings. Getting stuck in a rut like they always do. Who woulda thunk it, all our lives hanging in the balance of the greatest romance since Casablanca. There’s something kind of awesome in that._

_Lawrenceville, Kansas, 1960_

“Once upon a time there was a very hungry bird. He was flying low in search of water because he was so very thirsty. He flew and flew and flew but nothing. No water anywhere as far as the eye could see. Finally, there, on the side of a building, a picture of a glass of water glittered in the sun. Faster than thought the bird put all he had into reaching that glass. Bam. He hit the side of the cement wall and fell to the ground lifeless, both wings torn asunder, his little neck snapped. He awoke sometime later, reanimated by the ferocity of his desires. But he wasn’t a bird anymore. No, he was twisted, evil. He traveled on, wrecking havoc on the civilians of the countryside. Now water wouldn’t be enough, his thirst could no longer be quenched by earthly possessions. Instead he feasted on the blood of innocents. Hunters of large game around the world came to discard of him and lost their lives in the effort. He traveled in this manner for decades, unhindered, nothing could kill him. One day a young man by the name of Colt created the weapon to level the playing field. One shot and what should not be breathing stopped permanently. Colt took his gun and hunted down the monster that thirsty little bird had become. So you see, Mary, supernatural powers or no, hunters will always triumph over the monsters of the world.”

 

Mary Campbell looked sleepily up at her father. She’d been listening to variations of this bedtime story for as long as she could remember. An evil monster, hunters that couldn’t stop it until finally _The_ Colt appears, and all the world is saved.

 

Even at just six years old she knew it wasn’t true, nothing ever ended perfect. There was always a victim and sometimes they couldn’t be saved. That little bird didn’t get to live out his life, all the innocents he killed what about them? One gun didn’t make up for it, setting the bird to rest like her mom said they did to all the bad things…that didn’t make up for it either. She wished her daddy would understand and maybe sometimes…maybe Cinderella for once?  Maybe they could read that.

 

Her gaze shifted as her mom appeared in the doorway.

 

“Really, Sam? I say read our daughter a bedtime story and _that’s_ what you pick?”

 

“It’s a valuable life lesson,” Samuel Campbell answered gruffly. He placed one large palm on Mary’s forehead, his thumb rubbing the small frown out of her brow, and then he was moving over so her mom could say goodnight.

 

He gave the room one final look over before flicking off the light-switch and flooding her mother and herself in darkness.

 

She wasn’t scared of the dark anymore, but the room felt smaller without him in it. Mary stretched a little and gave a long yawn.

 

“Oh, Mary,” her mom sighed, watching her. “This wasn’t the life I imagined for you.” It was whispered softly and Mary knew the words were meant more for her mom than for her.

 

Mommy never read her Cinderella either. She only got to hear it at school.

 

Deanna brushed her daughter’s bangs from her head carefully, pressed a kiss to Mary’s temple and turned to leave. But first she made sure the shotgun was loaded and the salt lines were drawn.

 

That’s the way they said ‘I love you’ in her family.

 

Mary fell asleep. Safe.

 

                       

_Lawrenceville, Kansas, 1978_

 

Mary gazed at her dining room set critically. No one had ever confused her with Susie homemaker and after tonight they still wouldn’t. She just hoped her parents would see the effort and lengths she’d gone to prepare for this. And pretend, if just for the night, that they could be normal.

 

She didn’t have her hopes set high.

 

“Alright,” Mary sighed. “Are you going to say it or should I?”

 

John gave a little shrug, arms spread wide. “Say what?”

 

“What a bad idea this is.”

 

“It’s not such a bad idea…I’ve survived a war, what’s one night of the in-laws?”

 

Mary snorted indelicately. “Oh John, if that’s what you’re thinking we’re never getting through this.”

 

John grabbed his wife around her trim waist. “I thought you liked the optimist in me.”

 

“There’s optimism and then there’s denial.”

 

“As far as I’m concerned, whatever happens here tonight you’ll still be my wife by the end of it, so I’ll still be the luckiest man in the world. “

 

She couldn’t keep her frown in the face of John’s serious brown eyes. He was perfectly sincere even with the teasing lilt in his voice. He loved her that much. “Oh, you sweet talker, you.”

 

“Quit worrying, Mary. Your dad doesn’t think I’m good enough for his little girl, and you know what? He’s right.”

 

“John—“

 

“No, it’s true. I’m just a mechanic from a family of mechanics, war-torn, practically penniless, but I love you with all my heart and I’m going to give my all to our family. I guarantee there is no one in the world that will love you like I promise to. So. There’s that. And if that’s not good enough for your dad…” John cracked a smile. “He’s your blood, you’re the one that has to deal with him.”

 

Mary laughed and smacked him lightly across the chest.

 

He was just pulling her closer, grinning, when the doorbell rang. Mary jumped a little and John laughed at her again. One day she would stop feeling like a little girl sneaking around with her boyfriend behind her parents’ back. Hopefully before the baby was born.

 

And with that thought another niggling of doubt crept in. Maybe she should tell John first, privately, before she let _everyone_ know there was going to be an addition to the family.

 

Admittedly, the main reason she was choosing to wait until they were all together was a bit selfish. She kind of hoped her husband’s happy surprise would be enough to null the disappointment she was bound to feel when her parents gave her that open stare of disapproval. ‘Children don’t belong with hunters, Mary.’ If she had a nickel for every time she had to sit through a lecture like that, she and John wouldn’t be making due paycheck to paycheck. ‘You were a lucky surprise but this way of life is not what we would have wanted for you. For any child.’

 

No. But they’d have one, raise it on fear and an overblown sense of responsibility (every life lost, every case unsolved, every moment of fun tempered with ‘is there a monster out there robbing someone of their innocence right now’). And then doom it to live a life of seclusion, loneliness and isolation. Because hunters that get with hunters end up paranoid wrecks, and hunters that get with civilians end up sloppy. Either scenario had the potential to end in a painfully premature death. But, the way Mary figured it that was just part of being a hunter in general.

 

No point in belaboring all this in her mind. It was over and done. She was having this baby and she and John were going to love it with all their hearts.

 

They were just going to have to accept that she wasn’t a hunter anymore, no matter how selfish that made her.

 

Mary took a deep breath and put on her game face. “Ready?”

 

“When you are.”

 

“That’s not fair, John, you know I’ll never be ready for this.”

 

He pressed her close and kissed the side of her face. “It won’t be that bad, you’ll see.”

 

Mary had her doubts. John tended to have a very high tolerance for what “that bad” could mean.

Still, she couldn’t keep her parents waiting outside forever. Mary opened the door, her husband by her side- she still got a thrill thinking of him in those terms even three years later - and found her dad standing there alone.

 

“Where’s Mom?”

 

Something shifted in her father’s face, a subtle twitch that was there and gone. “Your mother wasn’t feeling well, she’s sitting this one out.”

 

“Is she okay?”

 

“Fine, fine. Just a little under the weather, you know how she gets when the seasons change.”

 

Mary watched his expression closely. Under the weather could be code for shaking off a cold or shaking off the remnants of an assault by vengeful spirit. More than likely it was the latter, lately they didn’t seem to be able to avoid a hunt, like she had been the only barrier between pretending at a real life and fulltime hunting and now that she was no longer there they didn’t have to even try.

 

“Are you staying for dinner?” Her father was already shaking his head before the words got all the way out her mouth. She wasn’t surprised.

 

“I’ve only stopped by for a moment. She asked me to drop this off.” Dad shoved a package into her arms. Glancing at it quickly, Mary could see the faint impression of ruins sketched into the paper wrapping and wondered how she was going to explain that to John. Her mom was always sending her protective charms and trinkets as if being out of the game meant she’d suddenly abandoned all sense and forgotten how to take care of herself.

 

She’d been hoping that tonight she could change some of those assumptions, that maybe they’d see just because she chose the life of a civilian didn’t mean she wasn’t still very much their daughter. It didn’t mean she was abandoning everything she’d ever known.

 

She wanted to prove she could take care of herself. There were five different levels and types of protections in the doorway alone, maybe if they saw that they wouldn’t worry about her so much.

Maybe they could pretend to be okay with the decisions she’s made for herself. Maybe they could finally accept John as her partner and love of her life.  

 

“I’d like to have a word with my daughter,” Sam said pointedly. Or maybe not.

 

“Right,” John said. “Send my regards to Mrs. Campbell.”

 

Her father nodded brusquely once, clearly waiting for John to leave. John took the hint, squeezed her shoulder in support and resigned himself to their tiny living room sofa.

 

“I suppose you don’t want to come in at all.” She already knew the answer but couldn’t help asking anyway. 

 

“This isn’t just a social call, Mary.”

 

Mary sighed. “No. I guess I shouldn’t have expected it was. All right, so what is this about, Dad?”

 

“Do you remember that job on the Whitshire farm?”

 

Mary’s expression clouded. It was five years ago but of course she did. She remembered every unsolved hunt she’d ever participated in; unsolved meant somewhere out there, one day in the future, an innocent life would be taken because of her failure. “The deal-making man with the yellow-eyes?”

 

Her father nodded. “He’s back and it’s you he’s interested in.”

 

A chill slid up Mary’s body. She’d barely had anything to do with that whole mess, but it hit the hardest because it was her friends and neighbors, people she saw every day dying.

 

“How do you know?”

 

“Because you’ve always been a special little thing Mary Campbell.”  Her father’s eyes flashed yellow and a wicked grin curled his lips.

 

Mary’s heart didn’t quicken, it tripped triple pace. “You.”

 

“Me.”

 

“You’re a demon? Only a demon can possess…or is that not my father? A skinwalker?”

 

But no -- skinwalkers could mimic completely, the flash in their eyes was reflected light, and it wasn’t yellow. No demon she knew could carry her mother’s package replete with holy symbols though, not without sizzling, and their eyes were normally black. So what…

 

Like lightning a flood of information on every supernatural monster she’d ever researched surged into her brain, but nothing matched up with the variables of the situation and she couldn’t think because she couldn’t breathe, and there was a baby in her stomach and she had to think and Jesus Lord, her dad, her DAD was he even--

 

“Oh no, sugar, you were right the first time. I’m a demon, just a little higher up the pay grade than you’re used to. You’re a hard girl to track down, Mary.I’m afraid I’m a little off schedule, but that’s okay. Better late than never, yes? I’ve come to offer you the deal of your life.”

 

“I don’t want to make a deal. You don’t have anything I need.” She inched backwards, listing to the left as she blindly felt around for a weapon. Five levels of protection before you leave the front door. Only one that was useful against demons. But a demon that could carry her mother’s wards? She didn’t know.

 

“No?” He moved aside his jacket and for the first time Mary saw the gaping wound in her father’s side. She closed her eyes and swallowed, everything in her screamed it was fatal.

 

“No, Daddy,” she whispered.

 

“Mummy too, I’m afraid.”

                                                                                                              

Mary shook her head in denial, swift and sharp until her neck cracked. “You son of a bitch. You stupid son of a bitch,” she whispered harshly.

 

“Oh, don’t be like that. I can fix it. I can bring them back. I just need a little favor from you. A boon if you would. A tiny little thing. It took so long to find you, Mary, I’m afraid I don’t have as much time as I would have liked to ease you into this. There’s so much more I need to do, you see. But first I need permission to enter your home when the time comes. No one will be hurt as long as I’m not interrupted. I’ll do what I need to do and then I’ll leave and you can go on living your boring little life of denial. You and the husband there, everyone can go on pretending life is just peachy and there’s nothing that goes bump in the night. What do you say, my girl, deal?”

 

Her fingertips brushed cold metal.

 

“You evil sack of lying shit!” Mary lunged to the side and reached for the iron vase behind the door.

 

She slammed it at his head, and her aim was dead on despite the demon wearing her father’s face because Dad always said “if you’re going to hit, don’t miss.” She was still her father’s daughter.

 

What used to be her dad hissed as his skin was scalded with iron.

 

Mary used the momentary distraction to race into the house, scrambling to shut the front door to buy her precious extra seconds. She didn’t know if it mattered that she hadn’t formally invited him in the house, he was a demon but he wasn’t like any demon she’d exorcised in the past, and besides she’d said words like, “aren’t you coming in?” She didn’t know how much time she had.

 

John was standing at full attention beside the living room couch as she flew around the corner.

“Mary what-“

 

She grabbed him by the arm and yanked him further into the house in answer, towards the study that was finally going to be her library when she got around to fixing it. For all her occult works that she couldn’t shake despite wanting no part of a hunter’s life, alongside her cookbooks, because she needed to learn how to feed her family something beyond military rations. Her own library filled with books she could never have owned in her old home because her parents didn’t believe there was a book worth reading that didn’t pertain to the hunt. Because even though mom hadn’t planned this life for her she was going to make damn sure her baby was safe. Oh God, her parents.

 

Her beautiful husband followed without question sensing the urgency in her movements.

 

She barricaded them in the study and John helped her move the bookshelf in front of the door, then retreated with her to the other side of the room where she kept the pitcher full of holy water and her rosaries. Plural. It had always confused him that she kept those since she’d never been particularly religious. She would have to tell him the real reason for them after tonight.

 

“What the hell, Mary? What’s going on?”

 

“You know how you told me that when you were a kid you were scared of clowns?”

 

“Every kid has a fear of something.”

 

“Yeah, well, you know how I told you when I was a kid I was scared of the dark?  It wasn’t so much the dark as it was the things that can come out of it.”

 

“Like bogeymen and monsters…”

 

“Like ghosts and skin-walkers and wraiths. I stopped being scared the day my dad put a combat knife in my hand and a rosary around my neck. But I never wanted a part of this, never.”

 

John, beautiful sweet giving John who’d survived a war without crushing the hope and joy and belief from his spirit, looked at her like she’d lost her mind. Who knew, maybe she had, maybe this was all some terrible twenty-year long nightmare. God, she wanted to wake up.

 

“What are you talking about, Mary?”

 

“I’m saying my father isn’t in the dry-cleaning business  – I mean he is but he isn’t. He--” She released a huge breath and visibly steeled herself. “We’re Hunters. We find evil things and get rid of them. My mom, my dad, all of us. Hunting things, saving people, it’s kind of the family business.”

 

John blinked at her. So she filled her lungs with air and tried again. This was a conversation she’d never intended to have with her husband. She had hoped she was done with that part of her life forever. A little trivial thing given the circumstances but all she could focus on right now because if she stopped to think for any length of time she’d realize her parents were gone. Forever.

 

“There’s a demon possessing my dad. What was my dad.”

 

“A demon,” he repeated numbly.

 

“He’s in the house by now and he’s going to discover us any second, I don’t have much longer. This is what I need you to do.”

 

John’s attention had shifted to the doorway so she shook him a little. “John, pay attention, are you with me?”

 

He snapped back to face her, but there was still too much disbelief, too much confusion.

 

“Are you with me?”

 

“We’re going to have to talk about this, Mary.”

 

“Yes, but not now, after we’ve survived this. Okay?”

                                                                                                                                            

“Tell me what you need.”

 

Something settled in her gut and relief started a tentative flicker through her. “Whatever happens you have to stay right here, on this side. You can’t cross over that rug, okay?”

 

She pointed and he stared eyes stuck for a moment. “John, promise me. It’s really important.”

 

He started to open his mouth just as the study door blew in and the demon walked in. He was looking worse for wear. Blisters were all over his face and neck where the iron had hit him, his jacket was torn open hanging from his shoulders and revealing the massive wound across his lower belly.

 

Her daddy’s bald head glistened with sweat, and for a moment she wondered if he was feeling any pain. She hoped being possessed was like being in a coma, she hoped his spirit had moved on and all the rest was just flesh held together by demonic presence.

 

She hoped but she didn’t think so, too many victims of possession came back too tortured for her to believe they felt nothing.

 

“Now is that any way to treat a guest, Mary? I was trying to be polite but I see you want to do this the hard way.”

 

He raised his hand and suddenly Mary found herself on the wall, stuck there by an oppressive weight squeezing her in.

 

John rushed him before she could even get a grunt out in warning. Crossing the rug in five quick steps, he was on her dad and encountering the resistance a superhuman being possessed. It was over. It was over faster than it took John to cross the room. The demon met John in the middle and when John went for its arms, the demon went for John’s neck. And let go once it snapped.

 

The momentary distraction killing her husband caused him to drop her none so gently to the ground.

 

“No! John!”

 

The demon that used to be her father but was now just a human suit wrapped around demonic stuffing, chuckled softly with her dad’s voice. “He shouldn’t have done that. But I guess now we just have something else to work with. How amenable are you feeling now, Mary?”

 

From her knees Mary extended a hand towards John. She couldn’t even go to him, she couldn’t risk their child.

 

“John, please baby, I’m so sorry, don’t leave me.”

 

His lifeless gaze stared back at her.

 

“No,” she moaned softly.

 

“I can bring him back. You know I can. But you have to do something for me first.”

 

Tears rolled down her cheeks, two, four. She couldn’t stop them. The demon tutted softly in sympathy but demons lie.

 

“My parents—“

 

“Sorry, sugar, you forfeited their lives with that little stunt you pulled out there. But that’s alright, who needs them? Let’s focus on your husband instead. His life for a little permission, what do you say?”

 

Demons lie and in one night he’d killed her whole family. Everyone but this little child growing in her belly, still too early to see.

 

“Get out of my father right now or so help me—“

 

“Or what, little Mary Campbell? Are you going to cry me into submission?”

 

Mary bowed her head and drew her knees up to her chest. Cradling them she buried her head in her arms. At first the sounds that came from her resembled crying, but then her voice grew steady and the exorcism was clear. Her dad had made her memorize this particular one for her eighth birthday. “You get this down, Mary girl, or there won’t be a party this year. Dead little girls don’t get to celebrate birthdays. Knowing your passages keeps you alive and kicking one more day.” It was the oldest one he had and he likened it to the Colt in words. She hoped he was right.

 

What was left of her father widened his eyes and tried to move for her, when he got stuck on the rug by the devil’s trap carved into their hardwood beneath it, surprise turned swiftly to rage.  

 

“You little brat!  If you do this you’ll never see _any_ of them again. Do you hear me? It’s over, they’re all dead, everyone you love!”

 

Everyone. Everyone but one and demons lie. Mary finished off the exorcism.

 

Across from her, her husband lay dead, and the demon screamed in agony as he was forcefully sent back to Hell.

 

When silence returned, she began preparing for a ritual that would keep him there for a while. If she was lucky, for long enough to find the gun her daddy had been telling her about since she was old enough to understand what a hunter was.

 

But first she’d lock him in hell, and then she had her family to bury. Mary placed a hand on her lower stomach and sobbed. She hadn’t even gotten a chance to tell John he was going to be a dad.

 

Seven months later, in a small cabin outside of Arkansas, she gave birth with the help of a mid-wife who performed exorcisms on the side. Screaming into the still winter air through the final pains of labor she wished for her mother and her husband with all her heart.

 

They answered her with a perfect, healthy baby boy.

 

He had long eyelashes and a tiny bow mouth, wide blue-eyes that would probably darken as he aged and bright blond hair as soft and silky as the down of a little duckling. She named him Dean Jonathan Winchester after two of the three people she thought about every day. She wanted Sam in there somewhere but she didn’t want to burden him with four names.

 

 

 

 

_Lawrenceville, Kansas, May 2, 1983_

Mary woke in the middle of the night. There was nothing particularly new about that; she couldn’t remember the last night she’d slept all the way through. She lived on three hours a night, power naps in the afternoon with Dean tucked in close to her side on the couch, Sesame Street chattering on in the background.

 

The slightest sound, the softest creek of the house settling or a branch scraping against a window brought her to full awareness, adrenaline flooding her body.

 

This was different though, off. Something was wrong, she felt it in every nerve in her body though she couldn’t tell what it was.

 

Her civilian side wanted to attribute it to the fact that this was the second night Dean was sleeping all the way through the night in his big boy race car bed. 

 

He was handling the move better than she was. Without her baby by her side - although four years old now, he was quick to remind her he was hardly a baby – she never felt totally safe.

 

Missouri was right though, it was time. No matter how uncomfortable it made her feel to have all that was left of her family more than an arm’s length away from her at all times, she had to let him grow up. She had to stop checking in on him and needing him in her sight, she refused to turn her son into the same hyperaware ball of anxiety she’d been at his age. She would let him grow up without fear hindering his decisions.

 

The hunter in her, that she couldn’t beat out, no matter how many times she moved, or what fake name she used, or how long it’d been since her last hunt (officially five years since the yellow-eyed demon, ten years before that)... that side of her was screaming _get up! Get your son and move!_

The fight between the two stuttered her step and she stumbled a little getting out of her bed and had to catch herself on her nightstand. The picture she kept of her and John on their wedding day toppled over. A frown pulled at Mary’s lips, she couldn’t help feeling it was an omen.

 

Just in case, she stopped by her closet and shoved all the clothes to the side. Behind a row of jackets was hidden a small deep freezer. The little white box hummed quietly as she opened it and extracted an icicle replica of her favorite throwing knife. She gripped it carefully by its iron handle, ignoring how her hand numbed immediately on contact.

 

She should never have moved back to Kansas. Every night she’d been here was a night of sleeplessness and memories. She didn’t want to raise Dean as a hunter but raising him on the run was just as bad, just as unstable, at least growing up Mary knew she always had a home. The Campbells always had Kansas. Maybe that was what brought her back here despite all her misgivings.

 

Despite everything the Campbells had always been safe in Kansas, and she needed safety for her son, she needed it like she needed air.

 

Mary moved down the hall to her son’s bedroom. She touched the door with the tips of her fingers and already knew she wouldn’t find him there. It was shut tight and she always left it ajar so that he could see where he was going during the night should he need the bathroom.

              

There was a small sound of movement downstairs. Straining, gurgles…

 

The fist clenched around the handle of her knife didn’t shake, holy water dripped in trickles down her wrist as it slowly melted, but her hand didn’t tremble. It was the only part of her still steady everything else was jello.

 

Dean was a good boy, he knew the rules, he wasn’t allowed to go downstairs without her. In four years he had never disobeyed that one.

 

The noise led her to the kitchen.

 

At first it looked like Dean was leaning over the kitchen table, gagging on a liquid, alone. His little shoulders were hunched to his ears and his back was arched painfully so each vertebrate on his back stood out in vivid relief. His superman pajama top crumpled up across his back revealing the concave expanse of his stomach, the soft muscles trembled as he heaved.

 

He heard her and raised his head, but his eyes were vacant and there was dark blood around his mouth.

 

“Dean,” she moaned terrified.

                                                  

“Hi, mama. The man asked if he could come in and show me a surprise, but I don’t think I like it anymore.”

 

“Oh honey, no…”

 

His glazed eyes regarded her cautiously, a little furrow of concern marred his brow and he was blinking slowly, trying to pull his lips up into a smile that kept slipping away.

 

“It’s okay,” he reassured, “I just got a little boo-boo. It doesn’t hurt much. And m’tummy’s all better.”

 

He curled back over and was retching again instantly belying his words. Nothing came up this time but a thick lump of mucus filled saliva. It landed on the table along with the other mess.

 

A man stepped out of the shadows. She’d never seen him before, not like this. But those eyes, those yellow eyes.

 

Four years, twelve false leads across thirty-four states as the Colt slipped further and further out of her grasp, she’d never forgotten him.

 

Yellow-eyes smiled broadly and raised one finger to cover his mouth, in his other hand was one of her kitchen knives. He raised it slowly to play against the vertebrate of Dean’s back, down his side, back up to the collar of his shirt and in the shallow hollow of his throat. 

 

“He says we have to be quiet if we want to see the rest of the trick.”

 

The knife played back and forth against the pale expanse of her son’s skin, and Mary watched  mesmerized with fear. 

 

“He says he wants you to sit down and watch, it’s almost over now.” Dean’s words slurred together the way they did when he talked in his sleep.

 

The knife glinted. Mary had no illusions that the request was more of a command. Dean’s blood dripped down his chin.

 

“You should have taken the deal, mommy,” Dean whispered sadly. 

 

The kitchen exploded in light. The mess on the table was more than just blood and vomit now, it was bubbling and stirring without the help of any of the kitchen’s other occupants. The man remained silent, that silly, terrifying grin plastered on his face.

 

“Everything would have been fine if you had just taken the deal. Daddy would have been around and then you would have had my baby sister or brother and we wouldn’t be going through this right now.”

 

It wasn’t her son talking. It was her son’s voice and her son’s little body and her son’s lips pushing out the words, but it wasn’t her son talking.

 

“Why couldn’t you just do as you were told, Mary? Why do you have to make everything so damn difficult. Now sit!”

 

She sat.

 

“I’ve tried to be nice, I’ve tried to do this the easy way, but you just won’t let me. John was supposed to be around, this child wasn’t supposed to be _made_ but you just wouldn’t let it happen, would you?”

 

On the table, the same one she’d fed her son three times a day for the last four months because children deserved routines – children deserved their meals at a kitchen table with the people they loved sitting there with them - the mess of bodily fluids and Lord knew what else started to solidify.

 

The man came closer and Mary realized he didn’t have a face. Not completely. Lips, a mouth, a chin, but where his eyes should be were gaping holes where yellow fire raged instead. Where his cheeks should be was melting flesh – like plastic that was left in the heat for too long. He held his hands out over the table and blood poured from his wrists, chunks of flesh dripped off in thick fatty splatters, baring bones and ligaments in their wake.

 

Dean had gone silent, thankfully. She looked over at him and he had slumped in the chair, his little legs dangling from the seat and his head tilted down to his chest as if all the energy had just been cut from his body and he’d fallen asleep right there.

 

The man opened his mouth and started to scream. It was loud and it was long and it was every tormented, tortured, desperate sound she’d ever heard from every victim she’d ever failed to save. He was melting faster until she couldn’t identify the parts falling off any-more, each part liquefying away like a little wax figure disintegrating in the sun and mixing in with the amalgamation of _stuff_ on the table.

 

She watched numbly as he faded away, the forgotten ice knife of holy water in her hand melting along with him.

 

In the last moments he opened his mouth, or rather the gaping hole that extended across the entire upper half of his face and encompassed where his mouth used to be. Out of it poured a thick black smoke, heavy and oppressive and stinking of rotten eggs. It dissipated faster than the man had melted, sliding through her air vents too quickly for her to see if any of the smoke made it to the pile on the table, and leaving behind the faintest trace of sulphur.

 

Finally when he was gone all that was left was the sound of her panting breaths, and the soft snores of her four year old.

 

And the wailing heart wrenching cries of an infant.

 

There, on her table, covered in a thin wet sheen, a naked baby flailed miserably.

 

On her table where her son had bled. There where he used to eat all his meals but would never again because they were getting the hell out as fast as they could.

 

 A fully formed human baby, grayish-pink in the dark, kicking his fat little thighs as hard as he could and arching his back like a helpless, angry, naked kitten. No matter how loud he cried, or how much he flailed he stayed in the same position. He was a big baby but was just as clearly a newborn as he was a boy.

 

Mary took all this in a split second before she was rushing to Dean’s side, the melted knife clattering to the floor behind her. She scooped him up into her arms and he groaned. The steady thrum of his heart pounded reassuringly against her fingertips as she checked his pulse. She wrapped him in her arms and held his cheek to hers, breathing him in. There were no cuts on his body that she could see. When she opened his mouth it was just a healthy pink color, no blood visible. She shook him slightly to wake him, to make sure he could wake up. Dean blinked up at her groggily and tried to pat at her hair in comfort but his limbs weren’t working correctly, they were too heavy to lift, she could tell, like they were on days when he overexerted himself on running through the park or spinning in a circle or jumping off the couch cushions over and over again.

 

Christ, what happened here tonight?

 

The baby screamed on.

 

She felt herself reacting to it. Felt the desire to go to it, comfort it, comfort him. 

 

She was thinking as a mother not as a hunter but she didn’t know what else to do. She’d played mommy too long to try for something else.

 

Instead she hoisted Dean up onto her hip. He lolled against her, burying his face in her throat, arms dangling relaxed at his side. He’d gotten big while she’d been looking too close, the bottom of his feet brushed against her shins. His long blond hair tickled at her nose, it darkened further every day.

 

She saw his father in him a little more every day. 

 

The baby’s tiny chest undulated as he cried deep from his belly; he was shivering hard and miserable, his eyes were squeezed shut and the tiniest hint of swelling was appearing around them – he was too small to make tears. Too young.

 

She couldn’t carry Dean with her and grab the baby too. She wasn’t sure if she wanted that squalling unnatural thing anywhere near her own child anyway.

 

She was thinking too much like a mother not like a hunter. She didn’t want to admit to herself what a hunter would do.

 

She couldn’t…

 

The baby on the table was a boy. A little tiny boy with wisps of brown hair covering his scalp, a little bowl of a tummy with a fully healed outie belly button, tiny little feet with ten perfect toes. Sad and scared and crying. She couldn’t kill it.

 

Shaking, the first thing Mary did was carry Dean into the living room and place him carefully on their loveseat wrapped in a blanket.

 

Then she went back into the kitchen and cradled the baby to herself without looking at anything else, quick like peeling a band-aid off or shooting a skinwalker still shifted to look like a loved one. His skin was cool to the touch, the slime he was coated in felt tacky. He calmed immediately, curling into her.

 

She found a sponge-bob throw to swaddle him in and his wiggles ceased altogether except for the random familiar hiccup and stutter of breath a baby who’s been crying too long and too hard always falls into.

 

Dean had been colicky as an infant. Her doctors, each six in each six states she’d traveled that first year of his life, had all said it was a product of stress leading to gas in her breast-milk. She’d switched to formula when he turned three months and felt like a failure.   

 

Mary returned to the living room as quickly as she could and set him on the couch. Then she went about encircling them in salt and loading her shotgun. And then another. And another. And another. Then she laid out her knives, and then she started with the protective sigils.

 

She wasn’t comfortable staying so stationary but she wasn’t traveling in the same car with her son and that …baby. She didn’t know what it was, she didn’t know how dangerous it was. She wasn’t going to be a moving target.

 

She also couldn’t leave it. Not yet.

 

He looked so real…so human. So little and defenseless.

 

Twice when he woke she fed him warm whole milk diluted with distilled water, careful spoonful by spoonful off the end of her pinky finger. She regretted throwing out that can of emergency formula she’d kept on hand three years before, and even more so all of Dean’s old bottles. But then again if she could have predicted this she would have stopped it from happening.

 

She twisted a hand-towel around the baby’s lower half to catch any waste. Dean slept on obliviously.

 

By morning she was almost convinced it was a normal human newborn. Almost. She couldn’t make herself hug him, hold him. When it cried she touched his belly and rocked him lightly with the fingers of one hand but otherwise she tried to refrain from holding him.

 

It was a boy.

 

He had clear blue eyes like Dean had when he was born. When he grimaced dimples formed in his cheeks.

 

He breathed like a baby.

 

She didn’t know what she was going to do.

 

In the morning Missouri Mosley was on her front steps without receiving a phone call. Mary nearly shot her through with iron. “You’re so loud with your thoughts, child, I didn’t need a machine to tell me you needed my help.”

 

Mary offered a tentative smile and put down her gun. Relief bled through her body. On the loveseat Dean snored on. Her poor baby was worn out.

 

The baby on the couch wriggled like a newborn kitten. He was pretty big, maybe eight or nine pounds, but still small enough that Mary wasn’t surprised that last night was his first night of life.

 

She picked him up and offered him to Missouri who, instead of taking it like she was supposed to, laid one hand on its blanketed belly, forcing Mary to adjust her grip and hold him closer to her chest.

 

Mary felt numb. And tired. And so alone.

 

“Is he a demon?” Mary asked softly. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to know the answer. She’d been asking herself the same question all night, she wasn’t sure if it would make a difference.

 

“No,” Missouri answered immediately. It was only a small relief - there were still so many other things he could be.

 

“This child is not all human either, no,” Missouri began slowly. “But he’s not malevolent. He’s …something. He’s an innocent baby with a life to live that will decide what becomes of him just like the rest of us. He might have been born of evil but he is not evil.”

 

A small yawn loosed those deep dimples on either side of his face again, a tiny mouth full of healthy pink gums, little fists lifted high in a full body stretch. 

 

“Missouri…I can’t--”

 

Missouri looked into her face and saw behind the cold shock. Mary had never been so grateful that she didn’t have to say the words. _Take him away, take him as far as you can_. 

 

“There’s a hunter, researcher really as he likes to stay out of fieldwork unless the circumstances are dire. He’s lost someone like so many of us have, lives alone. He might be willing to take the boy.”

 

“Please. Do. I can’t ...” she trailed off miserably, looking down at the baby in her arms. He was so very small, reminded her so terribly much of Dean when he was that age. Dean in the bright blue of his eyes, John in the twin dimples that dug deeply in his cheeks, and all that kitten soft light brown hair. She’d wanted a large family with John. At least two children. A brother for Dean.

 

“Sam,” she said. “If I could, I’d name him Samuel, after my dad.”

 

Missouri nodded, softly, in sympathy. “I’ll pass it on.”

 

Missouri reached for the boy and Mary handed him over, her stomach clenching. “He’ll be safe?”

 

The baby blinked large eyes at her, almost as if to ask, where are you sending me?

 

“He’ll have a chance. And so will you.”

 

Mary swallowed hard and turned away. She had a son to think about. An innocent little boy was in there waiting for her, needing her to protect him.

 

They left soon after that, Missouri and little Sam, before Dean even woke. There was no point in the woman staying longer; they had no answers for each other. Mary had a mystery to figure out, one on which her life and her son’s life might depend.

 

Missouri couldn’t explain what exactly had happened that night, but it was okay, Mary knew enough. Missouri didn’t think the demon would be returning, at least not any time soon. The usual sulfuric residue was more than usual…whatever he’d done that night had taken a lot out of him, nearly killed him from what Missouri could guess…if demons could die.

 

It wouldn’t matter. He wasn’t getting back in. Dean wasn’t going to be so naïve again, and neither would she. They didn’t have the luxury of sticking their heads in the sand. The paranormal was out there and it was too late to turn back and pretend it wasn’t. She’d done a disservice by her son in pretending; she’d nearly killed them both like she’d killed his father before him. It wasn’t going to happen again.

 

Mary vowed to teach everything she knew about hunting to Dean. Once upon a time she’d sooner slit her own throat. The worst thing she could have imagined back then was having her child live the life of a Hunter.

 

She knew better now, there were far worse things in the universe.

 

That night they packed light and they were on the road again. The next day she began. Dean took to it like a duck to water. It was in the genes.

 

 

 

_Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 1983_

 

 

“She wants to name him Samuel,” were the first words out of Missouri Mosley’s mouth that Bobby could process after that shocker of an opening she figuratively knocked him upside the head with. 

 

Bobby privately was of the opinion that anyone willing to drop a kid off with the nearest convenient stranger didn’t get a vote on the name. He kept it a private thought for three reasons; one - he knew when to shut his mouth – this wasn’t a fairytale they were living; the end of the rainbow was more often a cliff than a pot of gold. There was no telling how the kid got here much less the reason behind his mom’s inability to keep him. Two – Missouri had probably already picked the information off the top of his head like skimming oil off the surface of water. And three:

 

“It’s as good a name as any, I suppose.”

 

The wriggling, squalling thing Missouri cuddled to her chest didn’t much look like a Samuel to him, but in all fairness unless they named it ‘naked red mole rat’ it fit him as well as any other might.

 

“Well?” Missouri asked impatiently. “Are you letting us in, Bobby Singer, or are we to freeze to the bone while you decide if our company is worth keeping?”

 

After a few beats where Bobby considered the ramifications of just dousing them both with the bottle of holy water still clenched in his fist – and which was temporarily forgotten in the hullabaloo of Missouri’s announcement of, “Congratulations. You’re a daddy and it’s a boy.” – He gave a mental ‘what the hell’ and shifted out of the doorway. If she passed through the devil’s trap at least they’d got demon crossed off the list.

 

He really needed to keep his phone and address unlisted. With the hunting community too.

 

Missouri made it quite comfortably through the devil’s trap and set herself up on his couch, arching her back as content as a housecat.

 

“Wooo. I’m not as young as I used to be and this child is a lot heavier than he looks. One more second and I might not have a back to speak of,” she replied as casually as if he’d spoken his thoughts aloud.

 

He amended that last thought. With the hunting community _especially_.

 

“At least let me pretend my thoughts are mine,” Bobby grumbled before hesitantly placing the bottle of holy water on the scarred coffee-table in front of her -- though it was more apt to hold obscure books, scotch or the odd weapon than coffee.

 

“If it’ll ease your mind, I’ll have a swallow of that swill in a glass of iced tea, please. Otherwise just the tea.”

 

Bobby scratched the back of his head, and then automatically reaffixed his ball cap. The last time there’d been iced tea in the house…actually; there’d never been iced tea in this house. He’d built it to his specifications on the most supernaturally neutral ground he could find (something about all that scrap iron) and iced tea hadn’t been a requirement.

 

Missouri sighed long-sufferingly. “I’d feared so. Alright, just a cold bottle of water. Mix it with the holy stuff if you must. You’re just going to have to take my word for it that this baby’s not anything he shouldn’t be, he’s just had a full bottle and won’t want anything more for another two hours at least. And when he’s done, he’s done. This child knows his own mind already, seals his gums tighter than Fort Knox when he wants to.”

 

“Drink up.” Bobby motioned towards the coffee-table. Cold holy water was just about the only type of bottled water he carried.

 

With a disapproving twist of her lips, Missouri retrieved the abandoned bottle and took a swig from it, her brow furrowed. After the first swallow her face cleared and she downed the rest without taking a breath. The baby had ceased wailing and was now regarding everything around him with an open curiosity Bobby didn’t think was quite age appropriate.

 

Though, what he knew about children amounted to what Rumsfeld knew about eating with forks and opposable thumbs.

 

Feeling a little surer about Missouri’s body actually only containing Missouri at least, if nothing else, Bobby sat in the armchair directly across and got down to the point.

 

“What’s his story and why’d you bring him here?”

 

“You’re not old enough to be going senile already,” Missouri chided gently, putting the empty bottle down. “You know why we’re here.”

 

Yeah. He knew why they were there, but he couldn’t understand how he’d gone from answering the door for an old friend to warding off parenthood. “I ain’t fit to be no one’s daddy.”

 

“Fit enough to be this boy’s. There’s a limited pool he can pick from, Bobby, and you’re the lucky winner.”

 

She turned the baby towards him and their eyes locked inadvertently.

 

“He’s got no one and nothing. If he’s to have a chance, he’ll need someone to love him hard enough to remember his beginnings without making them determine the rest of his life. He’ll need a hunter to protect him without seeing a monster waiting to escape.”

 

The baby stared on, until abruptly his little lashes started fluttering and his little eyes were closing and just like that it was asleep.

 

Oh. Or no, not asleep, but getting there. Bobby watched as the baby yawned big and wide, eyes popping open and immediately searching for…something. He locked in on Bobby again and settled down, content.

 

“You’re it, honey, you’re all that’s keeping this poor child from his birthright and if you don’t do it…then we might as well just shoot him now, save a lot of folks from a lot of pain.”

 

Bobby didn’t bother asking what his beginnings were; they’d get around to that.  For now the most important piece was how there had to be a better choice. The last time someone had asked Bobby to be a parent it had led to a blow-out of an argument where his wife didn’t speak to him for three days. It was the last thing they’d ever argue about, and the only thing he’d ever denied her. All these years later the subject was no easier. 

 

“Oh, now, none of that, Bobby. She wouldn’t want you to be a lonely old curmudgeon for forever. Accepting this child wouldn’t be a slap in the face of her memory. But the responsibility of this baby has to be your choice, not misplaced guilt. Here’s the full unvarnished truth, you’re the only one I’d trust with not just his life but his well-being. This baby is going to be something special but he’ll need someone special to get him there. Whatever they made you think growing up, it was all lies. There’s no one I’d trust with him over you. Not even myself.”

 

Missouri leaned back on the couch, cradling the bundle to her chest. One tiny arm escaped the wrap of blankets and a little fist waved around with less coordination than a newborn colt. 

 

Bobby sighed. He wasn’t exactly comfortable with her techniques but admittedly it was easier to have her read his arguments than for him to have to push the words out his mouth.

 

“Samuel,” he questioned cautiously.

 

“That’s what …she would like.” The slight pause where Missouri stumbled over the name of the child’s mother was not lost on him. He resigned himself to that being one piece of the puzzle he just wasn’t going to get.

 

“It’s such a big name for a little boy.”

 

Missouri took the mumbled observation as acceptance, stood and placed the baby in his arms. Bobby felt his throat close up. It was the heaviest load he’d ever cradled, though it couldn’t weigh any more than nine pounds. He felt bulky and awkward, nothing at all like the ease with which Missouri had lifted the rug rat.

 

“He’d be your child in all but blood. You get to choose. Samuel is just a suggestion.” Missouri smoothed the headful of silky brown hair peeking out from the blankets. The smell of talcum powder and clean baby drifted up to him. She adjusted the baby so his little head rested in the crook of Bobby’s elbow. Warmth seeped into his bones. The baby relaxed immediately, a tiny foot pressed into Bobby’s stomach, the rest of him curled into Bobby’s side. Eyelids drooped until finally eyes closed and stayed closed. That fast he’d been judged, found perfect, and loved.

 

His heart was beating too fast; he took a few deep breaths so the baby wouldn’t wake. Samuel. His son. 

 

“Hi there, Sam,” Bobby whispered gruffly.

 

A spit bubble escaped between tiny parted lips. Sam slept on. 

 

 

_So there you go. That’s how it starts. That’s the back story. The middle is only interesting for those that live it, day in day out the monotonous individual seconds ticking on as life happens. Flashes of moments, bits and pieces of choices you don’t get to understand until it’s already done. Pivotal decisions slide by masquerading as casual details Flash Flash and then you’re back at the beginning again_

_Around the country, 1983-2005_

 

 

 

Flash.

 

If there was one survival skill that had served Mary well every moment of her life ‘repression, denial, and moving on’ was it. Horrors that couldn’t be processed were locked away for later. Information that couldn’t be used was written down for safe keeping. A hunter couldn’t get bogged down by details or regrets. A hunter traveled light and lived lighter.

 

So Mary placed that night carefully in a little box – literally in the form of case notes, sparing no detail, committed it to paper, and exorcised it from her mind – and refused to let it out again.

 

It worked because between being the best mother that ever existed to compensate for being the worst parent in the world by shoving her child into the role of a hunter, Mary didn’t have much time left over for anything else. She didn’t want to have extra time. Then she’d have to think about what she was doing and if she did that…everything was going to fall apart. She couldn’t think, she had to just keep moving, keep going.

 

 

Flash.

 

Missouri had stopped dropping by after the first six weeks. Stopped calling regularly after the first four months.  As much as it was a relief – the last few years Bobby wasn’t ashamed to admit he’d become something of a hermit – every now and again he realized a tiny life relied on him for _life_ (every day, all day, every second, and every decision) and frankly during those moments that he remembered with the force of a battering ram slamming into his gut…well, to say he felt sick to his stomach was putting it mildly.

 

Yet, somehow here he was, a single parent to a grumpy, sleep deprived eight month old. And thanking his lucky stars that so far the only thing Sam did when he was grumpy was shriek at the top of his lungs like any other indignantly angry infant who was very not pleased with their caretaker’s ability to take care. Given his origins, which Missouri had to explain on four separate occasions before Bobby could wrap his mind around it, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the sitting room furniture caught fire every time Sam’s dander was up. Wouldn’t have been surprised and probably would have just invested in flame-retardant furniture. He was in this for the long-haul.

 

“Listen up, Sam-I-Am,” Bobby said gruffly, his throat feeling like someone had rammed a sand-paper covered sword down it (after all that humming and singing and chanting). He cradled little Sam to his chest, head in the crook of his elbow, feet pointing towards Bobby’s stomach, the way Sam liked it.

 

“It’s you and me in this thing. No one’s bailing us out, you get me? Now I’m not always gonna know the right thing to do or say, I’m kinda figurin’ this daddy-bit out myself, so you gotta work with me here. You and me boy, that’s all we got, but it’s better than nothin’. So we’ll make do. We’ll help each other and be good to each other. And when you make me want to pull my hair out, what little of it I got left, I’ll try ‘n remember that and won’t get my panties all twisted up my ass. That’s my promise. Same for you to me, alright? So all this screamin’ your lungs out at ass-o-clock in the mornin’s gotta quit. Can’t be yer Daddy on one brain-cell, boy, you gotta let me sleep fer more than jus an hour.” The last sentence or so tottered out a slow slur around his jaw cracking yawn.

 

Sam looked up at him with his big watery eyes and was blessedly quiet.

 

You won’t get thanked for doing the right thing, it was one of the first lessons Bobby Singer ever got and it was the one that stuck the hardest like a bad case of clap that just wouldn’t quit.

 

The second thing he’d learned was ‘family doesn’t begin with blood.’ Looking at the tiny baby in his arms Bobby thought it might be time to amend it. ‘family doesn’t begin or _end_ with blood.’

 

“Good baby, Sam-I-Am,” Bobby soothed, “sweet boy.” 

 

Flash.

 

Dean turned five eight months after the incident.

 

Mary took him to the amusement park, to the aquarium, the library, and every museum she could find. She smothered him with nursery rhymes and fairytales and stuffed toys and those huge Tonka trucks he loved. And she told him the lore and she prepared him with exorcisms in the form of lullabies. When he turned six instead of enrolling him for his first day of school she took him to target practice. He would be homeschooled until he was big enough to protect himself without her unwavering gaze.

 

She never let him think Santa Claus was real, or that fairies were anything but evil or that body parts should be left around for something supernatural to scoop up. They burned the leavings of every haircut.

 

 

Flash.

 

 

Somehow a year passed. And another. And another. They got on okay. Just the two of them.

 

Before Sam, Bobby’s parenting philosophy could be summed up somewhere along the lines of ‘babies were best off with other people”, give him a dog any day. And then maybe if he was really pressed he’d say parenting was a little like raising a puppy – you had to set rules, give them all your time and attention, and expect 99% of the time to be pissed on, chewed on, drooled on, and whined at for your trouble. Maybe a few other things tacked on.

 

Like…

 

Little kids were unreasonable creatures of habit. If he was lucky he could make that work for him. When he wasn’t it ended horribly, messily against him.

 

Even at one and a half Sam would sit for hours watching Pee-wee’s big adventure after his mid-morning snack. Which was great. Bobby was happy to let the kid do it, he couldn’t find a nanny that lasted longer than a week and often the movie was the next best thing when Bobby was elbow deep in research materials and needed Sam to sit quietly for a bit. Granted, the first time he’d seen the title speed across the television screen had led to the immediate (and okay, possibly wrongfully unnecessary and maybe even slightly harsh) dismissal of their third nanny…in a manner that had brought the girl to tears. In his defense, Bobby had mistook it for a porno, Pee-wee’s big adventure …seriously?

 

But wanting a warm bottle promptly at eight pm come hell or high-water or an electrical outage that’d taken all the power in the surrounding thirty miles…unreasonable. Kid wasn’t even drinking a bottle during daylight hours anymore, and had graduated to refrigerator temperature for all beverages (but milk apparently) four months prior. There was no reasoning with ear splitting shrieks and red-faced blubbering. 

 

Or …

 

They ate. Everything. All the time. He’d kind of thought by the time they weren’t doing bottles of formula every four hours (including eleven pm, three am, and seven am like clockwork – a vicious, loud clock) that he’d be able to slow down on the feeding times. He’d had the vague impressions of little kids as these picky, little creatures  you had to bribe to eat. The reality was more along the lines of wondering if Sam was mixed with a little bit of cow the way the boy grazed. There was breakfast, then mid-morning snack, Lunch, before nap snack, after nap snack, before dinner snack, Dinner, dessert, after dinner/before bed glass of warm milk and a grain bar or a cookie or an apple to go with it. Bobby didn’t know where the kid was keeping it, sure he was a little chubby but nothing more than the baby fat he saw neighboring four year olds had, and it definitely wasn’t going into height - the boy was the tiniest little thing around – all knobby knees and poked out pot-belly with round little cheeks. With his huge soulful eyes and the ragged long haircut (that Bobby let stay long because quartering Sam into the barber’s chair was a monthly task he wasn’t up to doing more often than that) people often mistook him for younger than he was…at least until he’d opened his mouth.

 

Or…

 

Overalls were excellent handle bars, perfect height and thickness, and allowed Bobby to maintain his grip despite desperate wiggles without hurting Sam’s chubby little wrists. Which was a handy compromise because he refused to attach a leash to his kid.   

 

 

Flash.

 

 

When Dean’s baby teeth fell out at 6 ½ they burned those too.   

 

Mary made connections with other hunters. Found entire hunting families with children within a year or two of Dean’s age. He became best friends with his third cousin, a boy who’d been raised in the life like she had because Campbells were hunters before anything else. Even when they didn’t want to be.

 

Except Dean was a Winchester and oh how he wanted to be. Both. Winchester and hunter. 

 

He took to it like an amphibian previously denied water suddenly dumped into a river. And he thrived. And a part of her wondered had it not been for that night, would she have been denying her boy his birthright? Or was she over-glorifying the horror now and setting him up for a miserable, short, existence?

 

Hunters didn’t have long expiration dates. Mary was counting down her own days, she was already thirty years passed her time, even if half that time she was more an observer than an active participant.

 

She was killing her son by saving him. Or maybe she was saving him by killing him.

 

She didn’t know. There wasn’t any way to set the train on an alternate track regardless. What was done could not be undone.

 

She was lucky he was turning out to be a _good_ hunter if he had to be one at all. Still, she worried. She wished John were here to help her.

 

She let that go too and kept things moving.  

 

And Dean grew. Strong, healthy, happy. Irrevocably a hunter. 

 

Flash.

 

Sam learned to talk. Somehow he’d picked up that Bobby was his father and that fathers were referred to as daddy, and Bobby’s chest just about swelled to burst the first time he realized Sam’s insistent “DA” was _meant_ to get Bobby to answer. Nearly had a cardiac arrest the first time the word morphed into “Dad” all high-pitched and wobbly in that new little voice Bobby was just getting used to after a whole two years of grunts and burbles and baby babble. Especially since Beatrice down the street had sad Sam was a late starter and should have had words six months ago. It was a relief when he exploded into speech, from screams and unending vowels to whole sentences. Long sentences, complicated multiple syllables all winding and unyielding like he’d been thinking these thoughts and just waiting for a chance to try them out on Bobby. All at the same time, in the same day, all day.

 

In defense, when he was three, Bobby taught him how to read so he could direct some of that chatter that way.  Like everything else Sam picked it up fast.

 

He learned how to read in what seemed like one afternoon, but in reality was bits and pieces of remembered sounds and answered questions finally coming together in understanding. All those “whys” Bobby had suffered through a year ago had finally made themselves useful.

 

“Dad, Dad, why don’t vampires just borrow from the morgue before people are buried? They’re not gonna do anything with their blood then.” 

 

Was answered with a reference book opened to the correct page, Bobby’s index finger pointing out the correct passage.

 

“Oh. They can’t drink dead man’s blood. Well but why? What’s so different about it, they can take from blood banks and that’s not part of nobody no more so it’s kinda like being dead, right, Dad?”

 

Which was responded to with three more reference books and the gentle order to “go look it up, if ya wanna know. What do I look like, a walking thesaurus?”

 

“Well a dictionary at least,” Sam would smart-mouth back.

 

And that was the other thing. The kid had a mouth on him, certainly nothing he’d gotten from Bobby himself, and he wasn’t around anyone much but Bobby and the dogs, but there it was just the same. Bobby never quite got around to curbing it. Bobby never would have gotten away with half the crap that came out of Sam’s mouth when he was a kid. Course when he’d been a kid ‘se _en and not heard_ ’ wasn’t a request, and the ‘ _rod_ ’ that wasn’t spared was an actual rod three feet by six inches and solid hardwood, so he wasn’t exactly pee-ing his pants to replicate his childhood.

 

Maybe it was the reading materials.

 

Perhaps he should have given him something more rug-rat specific, like Sesame Lane or something. He always meant to get around to picking up a few. Instead what he had were huge archaic tombs and a little boy with insatiable curiosity.

 

By four Sam had learned how to read in Spanish, Latin, and Old English. He didn’t understand what he was reading more times than not but it was clear he had a way with language.

 

And then he was picking up other things, learning things Bobby couldn’t remember teaching him. How to write his name. How to draw a devil’s trap. How to comfort his father on the eve of his dead wife’s death day with a hug and a peanut butter and jellybean sandwich – which tasted just exactly like it sounded.

 

He was becoming his own person.

 

Sam amazed him every day. So, no, being a dad was nothing like owning a dog.

 

 

Flash.

 

 

“What’re you doing out here, Dean?” Christian Campbell was three weeks Dean’s senior and lorded it over him whenever he could – which was oh…roughly every two point six seconds, so Dean was neither surprised nor moved by the ‘authority’ in his tone.

 

They were cousins that might as well be brothers. So it’s cool, Dean has always wanted a brother even if the bastard gets on his nerves half of the time.

 

It’s only fair that Dean’s recently undergone a growth spurt and is currently three inches taller than Chris. Dean likes to say that he got all the good looks so Chris has to make due with all the firsts, but honestly he was getting kind of sick of always being the one people treated like a kid.

 

“Thinking about my future. Where I’ll be in a few years. What I’ll be doing. Whether or not I’ll like it,” Dean responds.

 

“Oh, yeah? So this future…does it come with mammary glands too or just the uterus?”

 

Dean casually flicks him the bird and thinks again he should learn sign language, this one little gesture has been so helpful over the years that he should know more.

 

“No, seriously. You planning a great escape or something? You’ve been an antisocial bastard all evening. Last time you were this quiet you shaved the cat.”

 

“Hey, Mr. Fluffels liked that haircut.”

 

“If you call a sudden aversion towards all motorized appliances and late onset agoraphobia _liking_ …then sure.”

 

Dean shrugs. He’d shaved the cat four years ago, no one’s upset about that anymore, not even Mr. Fluffels. He even stops hissing if Dean carries around those tiny star treats he likes that smell like play-dough and are roughly the same consistency as rubber glue.

 

Chris sits in the grass beside Dean. “Your mom still wanting you to go to college?”

 

“Yeah, it’s kind of non-negotiable. Either I get a degree or …”

 

Well. Dean doesn’t really know or what, his mom hadn’t really supplied an alternate case scenario. Which kind of helped him make up his mind since she always gave him an option, always wanted him to figure shit out on his own before she’d ‘guide him in the right direction.’ So this was a pretty big deal. Kind of like learning his exorcisms by memory was a big deal, or getting that anti-possession tattoo -- which how freakin’ cool was that? His _mom_ was the one making him get a tat – Dean did not fight that one at all.

 

“You gonna go?”

 

“Yeah, I guess. It’s just weird though, you know? I mean she won’t even let me _think_ about high-school but doctoring up a fake diploma so I can go off to college is okay? Why can’t she just doctor up the Bachelor’s too?”

 

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s about the experience. Maybe she thinks it’s time you went out in the world and tried your hand at it. It might be okay. It’s kinda like she’s saying,” Christian puts on his mom voice, all high falsetto and batting eyes like Dean’s mom has never done, “‘look my cute little baby boy is finally becoming a man, aww I can trust him to wipe his own ass now.’”

 

“Shut up, idiot,” Dean laughs.

 

“No, seriously, man. It’ll be cool. Think of all the college chicks. And you’ll finally be old enough to bang them without getting them sent away for Stat too? Awesome.”

 

“I can do that now, retard. Sixteen is the age of consent in Nevada.”

 

“Yeah, well, who cares about Nevada. Prostitution is legal here too. I mean think of the world at large. College tail with no parents around to cockblock? I don’t see the downside here.” 

 

Dean rolls his eyes because what else is there to say? Chris doesn’t even believe his own shit, what’s it matter if Dean pretends to? 

 

Soberly Chris says, “I’ll miss you though. Maybe I’ll swing through wherever you end up.”

 

“Cool. I’ll introduce you to my harem.”

 

Christian affects Californian valley girl and flips his nonexistent locks. “As if. You’ll be asking to borrow _my_ harem, little bitty Deany-boy.”

 

They both laugh, probably a little longer than the joke was funny but growing up a hunter’s kid you learn to find humor where you can and take it as far as it lets you.

 

Finally, Christian throws an arm around Dean’s shoulder, as much as he can while the other boy is still laying down staring at the clouds. “Dean, really though, don’t worry about it, Cousin Mary thinks you’re the rising sun in her breaking dawn or some such shit, she’s not gonna just abandon you. And you know I’ve got your back. Think of it like an adventure. A four-year long adventure with more ass than you could sample with someone else’s stick.”

 

“Yeah,” Dean says. And that’s the end of that. 

 

It’s always just been him and Mom on the daily basis though. He worries about her. As much as he knows she worries about him. Who’ll be there to protect her if he’s off at school?

 

He’d rather know his mom was safe than be with some college girl.

 

 

Flash.

 

 

Life isn’t fair, that’s pretty much a given. Right? That’s true. No one _actually_ believes that life is a one hundred percent grand thing. No one leaves it, or goes into the middle of it, or even lasts much longer than the first few minutes of it still believing life didn’t have its faults.

 

It wasn’t like he was actually expecting things to be _fair._ It’s just…well, barring all that…things should at least make sense. Right? Was that really too much to ask?

 

Lying in the mud, cheek pressed into the wet dirt, eyelashes clumped with the stuff, nose bruised and busted, Samuel Joseph Deveaux contemplated the sheer injustice ripe within a twelve-year old’s life. The sheer _incomprehensibility_ of it.

 

If one was to get beaten up by one’s older, uglier, socially inept classmate, one should be first told _why_. That’s not about fairness, that’s about common sense! So, you know, one could get the chance to rebute, or uh…change one’s behavior so as to not incite one’s classmate’s wrath.

 

Hell.

 

If the whole reason for getting the stuffing kicked out of him was because he had _done_ something offensive, shouldn’t he be told? So he could not _do_ something offensive again? Right?

 

Of course…there was that whole problem with the offensive thing possibly being his _birth_. Couldn’t really help that now.

                                                                                                                  

“You okay?”

 

Sam jumped, scrambling up into a squat, palm to the ground, knees crouched underneath him, prepared for fight or flight - whichever it came to.

 

Then the voice registered and he slumped again, all the anticipation and trombone reverberations stripped from his body in one breath-taking whoosh.

 

“I’m fine,” he mumbled around a too thick tongue, jaw tight. It was gonna swell. Great. No way he could hide that.

 

“You don’t look okay.”

 

Sam gathered his legs beneath him, and in one great burst of energy pushed himself up. He was disgruntled to realize even standing, she was still taller.

 

But only by a few inches, and only because her mom was an Amazon, and her Dad was a giant. If she were anything other than freakishly large there’d be a serious problem.

 

Sam felt a pang of guilt for thinking of her as a freak. Briefly. He wasn't on real close-terms with that word seeing as how he’s been avoiding it since he was eight years old and his dad told him Sam’s own unique brand of the birds and the bees whereupon birds meant demon blood and bees meant he didn’t actually have any parents.  

 

“I said I’m fine, Ava,” he pressed out quietly, if a bit strained.

 

“We should tell Ms. Daniels.”  She said ‘we’ but she meant ‘I’ and Sam can feel the burn of anger simmering in his gut like acid indigestion did that one time Alex dared him to eat an entire pack of raw Oscar mayer hotdogs washed in ketchup. Dad had not been amused when he was non-stop projectile vomiting for the rest of the night.

 

He refused to hurl.

 

 

“Jesus, Ava! Will you leave me alone?” 

 

She doesn’t even flinch, instead she smiles down at him (stupid amazon genes) and insists, “Ms. Daniels would want to know.”

 

She just doesn’t give up. “I’m fine, go home! I’ll let you know if I need your stupid meddling but until then just leave me the hell alone, alright?”

 

Silence stretched between them like a live thing as Sam simmered and Ava contemplated…who the hell knew what, the wonders of the damn universe. Finally she turned and flounced off, dark pigtails bouncing, a nonchalant, “whatever, Sam,” thrown over her shoulder.

 

He’ll probably have to apologize to her tomorrow. Sam _hates_ apologizing. Dad says if you screw up there’s nothing for it but to man up and say you’re sorry, but Sam hates everything about it. Hates admitting he screwed up in the first place. Dad says that’s stupid and unrealistic ‘cause everyone does.

 

Still…Sam doesn’t like it. But when she’s not being nosy she’s a pretty good friend so he supposes it’ll be worth it. Not like he has a whole lot of friends to choose from.

 

Not that he cares. The whole town are stupid ignoramuses anyway. Dad’s the best out of all of them and they can’t even see it. With their dumb judgments and their ridiculous double-standards.

 

Sam knows all about double-standards, it’s when something is okay for one person ‘cause you like them but it’s a crime for someone else just ‘cause you think they’re crap to begin with.  It’s mean and it sucks and it’s one of those not fair things that don’t make any sense. 

 

Walking home is a chore. He’s sore and tired and there’s a bruise on his leg that’s trickling blood in places so it’s probably more of a scrape than a bruise …but then there’s the purpling parts and really, he’s not sure what all that adds up to. Bruise and scrape. He’s got a collection of the stuff, and he’s just glad Dad had to work late tonight. He doesn’t like it when Sam interrupts him during work so there’ll probably be dinner out already and he won’t come out to see what Sam looks like.

 

Sam doesn’t want to worry him.

 

And also Sam doesn’t want him doing anything drastic like calling _anyone_ ’s parents. He’s perfectly capable of defending himself and…and anyway Sam didn’t want him to hear what everyone said. About how his Dad was a drunk. 

 

About how his first parents were fools to leave Sam with him. About how maybe he would have been better off in foster care. They don’t know him, they think he’s just some old junkyard bum working on Miller time but he’s not. He’s…he’s the greatest. He might not ever say things like ‘I love you’ but Sam knows he does. He says things like “I’m proud of you” and “glad you’re here” and “thanks for the help, son” instead. And Sam knows. Sam knows the truth about himself, he knows who he is. Bobby Singer is a Saint. So they all just need to shut up. May the townsfolk of Sioux Falls South Dakota suck it and die.

 

 

Flash.

 

Sam was fifteen years old, two days shy of his sixteenth birthday when Bobby realized the bullet he’d suspected they dodged was just a slow-moving heavier caliber.

 

It started out just fine. Another day at the scrap yard like any other. Except for how Bobby was showing Sam how to operate the scrap metal crane.

 

He was doing pretty good, being careful. Sam was always careful when he had to be, he knew when to take things seriously. If he hadn’t Bobby would have never let him on.   

 

And then suddenly he wasn’t. The wide metal mouth swung heavily, clearly getting out of Sam’s control as it knocked into a row of heaping vehicles bowling the collective twenty tons over like so many pins.

 

Sam grabbed at the controls in panic, jerking too hard, moving too quickly and overcompensating and suddenly the machine was turning around and heading in Bobby’s direction.

 

“Turn it, Sam! Don’t let go, turn the damn thing, keep control!”

 

It was coming down too fast, the boy wasn’t going to be able to make it switch directions in time. There was nowhere for Bobby to escape, walls of car shells surrounded him like his own automobile graveyard.

 

He didn’t have to see his life flash before his eyes to know that this was the big one. Bobby’s last goodbye. His only regret was Sam was never going to forgive himself. He knew his kid, he wasn’t getting over this one anytime quick.

 

Bobby didn’t know exactly when his eyes closed, but he had to have shut them because how else could he be opening them, blinking hard against the too bright afternoon sun, when the collision took too long to arrive.

 

The reason for that was suspended above the ground by a good thirty feet, load and all.

 

“Dad?”

 

“Well, I’ll be.” Habit of curbing his tongue around an impressionable child who repeated _everything_ Bobby said kept the swear clean. Forty years, a war, and raising a half-demon baby he loved like his own flesh and blood and Bobby still had to clench his hand into a fist to keep from making the sign of the cross against his own child.  

 

Sam had escaped before the crane took to the heavens and stood beneath it, head tilted towards the sky as he stared at the mammoth piece of equipment drifting lazily in the sea of bright blue as if it weighed no more than a cloud.

 

A wobbly “Dad,” at an additional two octaves higher than Sam’s normal voice broke him out of his trance.

 

“I’m doing that?” He sounded in awe, scared.

 

“Take a deep breath. See if you can set it down.”

 

Bobby moved so that he was standing shoulder to shoulder with his son. The boy was getting tall, when Bobby wasn’t looking he’d reached his height. Maybe even passed it by a quarter of an inch or so.

 

“It’s okay, Sam-I-am,” Bobby soothed gruffly like he used to when the kid was a baby. “Deep breath in, let it out, and put the compactor on the ground. Easy as that.”

 

Sam hiccupped, breath shuddering hard as if he’d been crying for a while and been trying to hide it. But he listened, he always was a good kid, too big of a heart was his problem never an attitude.  

 

“You can do it. Just let it back down.”

 

Bobby clasped Sam’s forearm and willed over his faith, prayed he’d done good by him in case he was wrong and the whole thing fell on their heads.

 

The huge crane hung adrift for a moment longer and then it began to rock.  A thin whine was pulled from it as it shifted side to side. Sam set it carefully back to the ground. And then he collapsed, a thin line of blood drizzling from his left nostril.  

 

Flash.

 

Alyssa blushed red hot and allowed her hair to fall in her face covering her eyes. It was always fun flirting like this without any serious intent.

 

Jo rolled her eyes at the scene and snapped her wait towel at him. Dean caught it lazily in one fist and tossed it back at her.

 

“You kiss your mama with that mouth?” Jo asked.

 

“Oh sweetheart, you wouldn’t _believe_ what I can do with my mouth.”

 

The little blonde rolled her eyes again but Dean could see the flush on her own cheeks. The girl had a crush on him since before she could toddle properly and even though he saw her more as the little sister he’d never had it was still fun to tease her.

 

“I imagine just a little bit of everything _but_ keep it clean like your mother taught you.”

 

Dean grinned widely. “Where’s the fun in clean?”

 

“Speaking of mamas yours has been looking for you, Dean Winchester.”

 

A set of more sobering words has never been spoken.

 

“How long’s she been looking for me?”

 

Jo leveled a stare at him. “Long enough to call my mom, so…”

 

Dean winced. Mom only called on other hunters as a last resort. She kept him pretty close in the loop, said he needed a family, needed people who’d look out for him…But when it came to herself? Mary Winchester would sooner cut off her own legs than ask another Hunter for help. There were many things about his Mom he didn’t understand.

 

“Cell got trashed in the last hunt. Who knew river nymphs like to throw you in water before they have their wicked way with you?” 

 

If Jo kept rolling her eyes like that they were going to pop right out of her head.

 

“No, the river in their name doesn’t at all make me think of water,” she sassed.

 

He grinned at her and tugged on an errant strand of hair that had escaped her pony-tail. “That’s what I’m saying. They need to abandon the subtleties and just be upfront with what they want, you know?”

 

“Anyway, your Mom’s on the warpath. Just thought you should know.”

 

“Hey, yeah, thanks for the heads up, squirt.” Dean pulled on her hair one last time, just slightly harder and then he was leaving Allyson a generous tip, a wink, and sliding into his baby for the long drive home.

 

Well, mom’s home in theory since he’d moved out the year before. But it was hard thinking of his bachelor pad as _home_.

 

It was nice having a space for himself but he’d always think of home as a place where his Mom was just a few doors away, a soft hum under her breath either a wiccan chant or the latest song on the radio, safe and sound and in one piece.

 

Oh. Okay. Maybe he did know how she felt when he didn’t call.

 

Still, in his defense, checking in wasn’t something he was used to yet, he was still getting the hang of this hunting on his own thing sometimes, but he got her point. Too bad it she was more likely to be pissed off about the pit stop he’d made in Massachusetts with that fantastically buxomly brunette with the sky-high legs than the not calling. Seriously tits that otherworldly would make anyone forget he’d owed his mother a call.

 

By the time he got to the house it was raining outside, mid-day shower that had finally broken after threatening for most of the morning. Dean realized he was putting off the inevitable, but right now it was just so much more peaceful listening to the rain pounding down on his baby than going inside and sitting through another of mom’s lectures.

 

'It’s time to grow up, Dean. I didn’t raise you to treat women that way, Dean.'

 

It’s not like he’s using them any more than they’re using him. It was a...mutually beneficial arrangement they had going. He gave them the best night of their lives (or weekend depending on just how bendy the first time goes) and in return he gets to blow off a little steam without all the complications of a relationship with a civilian.

 

He wasn’t like Mom. He wasn’t going to meet the love of his life in some small town boy (or girl, rather) and settle down to raise some kids and just be happy that way. He’d rather be out there, doing things that mattered, saving lives, getting rid of the monsters. Besides, that apple pie fairy tale life hadn’t even worked for Mom.

 

All pretending the Big Bad didn’t exist ever got her was one dead husband. Of course, if she hadn’t taken a chance on John Winchester, he wouldn’t have ever been born…so you know, good lookin’ out, Dad, wherever you are. 

 

And then there was college because hunting wasn’t “the end all be all” as his Mom liked to say, she insisted he would have a life outside of the paranormal. He loved her to death but saying no to college wasn’t an option on the table and sometimes he’d really like it if she realized he wasn’t that scared four year old waking up in the middle of the night from night terrors about something he couldn’t remember. He’d learned instead that it was easier going along with what she wanted than wasting a whole lot of breath on a fight he wasn’t going to win.

 

So there was college and he chose to major in mechanical engineering because he was good with his hands, excelled at putting things together, great at figuring out a problem and it was just about the only thing short of acting you could actually use during a hunt. Hunting was all about being creative. Knowing the hows and whys of a situation, sure, researching your ass off before jumping head first into a nest of something nasty, hell yeah. But when you got there? When it was just you with your back up against the wall and a slobbering, fugly mother between you and the only exit? You sure as hell better know how to fashion a viable weapon out of a roll of cardboard and a metal sheet. It was like being the supernatural world’s Young MacGyver. Only hotter. 

 

Anyway it wasn’t like he was going to use his degree to get a corporate job or anything. He wasn’t about to turn civilian.

 

Besides, hunting was in his genes. He didn’t get why his Mom couldn’t get that. They had the same genes. She was just as good, just as capable, just as bad ass as half the male hunters out there nowadays. And the other half? She could kick their asses with one hand tied behind her back and her legs crippled.

 

He saw the fierce joy in her eyes when something evil was writhing on the ground in its death throes and she’d been the one to put it there. He knew she had the same sense of pride he got when another innocent life made it through another day and she was the one to make sure to keep it that way. So he really didn’t get it.

 

She says if she could have had it any other way he’d never know about the supernatural; he flinches every time. He can’t imagine going through the world some ignorant blissful … civilian. He hates that his Dad isn’t alive but he can’t help but be grateful for the night he can never remember that had spurred his mom into letting him become everything he was born to be.

 

The rain starts to ease up and Dean finally has no other excuse to stay in the car. He sighs and braces himself.

 

She must hear the keys jangling from the lock when he enters but she doesn’t look up from cleaning their weapons so no use asking if she’s pissed at him. Obvious.

 

“Hey, Mom.”

 

Mary Winchester cuts her eyes to look at him. “Well look what the cat dragged in, and only two days late. “

 

Dean gives her a sheepish grin. He frequently banks on being her only child to save him. “Got kind of held up during the last hunt.” She can’t kill him, she doesn’t have any spares.

 

“Yeah? What was her name?”

 

He’s a little ashamed to admit he hadn’t exactly gotten a name. Dean thinks about making one up just so he doesn’t have to tell his mother that that uncomfortable safe sex lecture she’d given him the entire year he was twelve went in one ear and out the other with the exception of ‘wear a

condom. Always.’

 

He forgets about it when she sighs and lays the sawed off down. “One day, Dean, your hormones are going to get you in a jam you can’t get yourself out of.”

 

“But until then be young, have fun, and party? Right?”

 

Mary raised an eyebrow and Dean gave up. He flopped down on the bed beside her and sighed. “Yes Mom, I’ll be boring and celibate forever. I’ll call every five minutes and never go anywhere without my cell, and I’ll have a completely monk-like existence, so you don’t have to worry.”

 

“I don’t care if you’re celibate. It would be nice if you’d stick with the same girl in the same week at least.”

 

“Variety is the spice of life.”

 

“Variety is the synonym of riddled with STDs.“

 

“Hey, I’m always careful. I wrap it up first. Promise, scout’s honor.” He raised two fingers in a makeshift universal boy-scout salute. 

 

Mom looked at him askance. “You were only a boy-scout for two weeks, Dean.”

 

“But what an informative two weeks it was.”

 

“You spent the whole time in the infirmary trying to suss out a Shtriga.”

 

“And learned how to wrap a sprained ankle like nobody’s business.”

 

Mary Winchester cracked a small smile at that and patted him on the arm. “I just worry about you. One day you’re going to be an old man, I’ll be gone…who are you going to have to watch your back?”

 

Dean was quiet. He didn’t know. He didn’t want to think about a world without Mom. 

 

 

Flash.

 

Jessica Moore was not Sam’s first girlfriend. She wasn’t even the first love of his life. She was just the first girl that he could see himself with forever. Forever forever, pushing each other’s wheelchairs and turning gray forever. Because lately, when he imagined getting old, he didn’t see a picture of himself like his Dad surrounded by dusty books and socializing with other Hunters when the need for human companionship got too much to bear, no, he saw a family. Children calling him daddy and a wife to hold on to at night, to wake up to in the morning, to love for every moment in between.

 

And really, why shouldn’t it be Jessica? She was a beautiful girl, whipcord smart and funny, and all those other adjectives people used when they were trying to describe just how perfect someone would be for you without being redundant and spouting a bunch of “oh my God you’re so perfect”s. Because she was. Perfect.

 

Except she didn’t really know him. She didn’t know that his dad was not really his dad, not in any biological sense. When she asked why they had different last names he, like a coward, told her that he kept his mother’s maiden name out of respect. He didn’t even know if he had a mother to have claimed her maiden name.

 

So bottom line was this: if he could he’d marry her today. Except that would be such a mistake, which he knew in his heart of hearts, because being smart and funny wasn’t enough if there was no trust. And through no fault of her own Sam had already decided he wasn’t going to trust.

 

It was enough to depress a person.

 

Sam finally arrived at his dorm room. He knocked on the door before carefully entering. His roommate had no concept of the purpose of locks and how they’re useful to engage should one decide lounging in the nude was an acceptable way to spend time outside of class.

 

God, he missed his own bedroom.

 

Luckily no one was in and Sam would probably have the room for a few more hours yet. He dumped his book bag on the chair nearest the door and flopped down on his tiny twin size mattress. He missed his bed too.

 

If there wasn’t protection in numbers, and had Dad not just about had a coronary when Sam suggested it, he would have bitten the bullet and paid for an off-campus apartment. He had a little bit of money saved up from four years of tutoring during high-school and then what Dad paid him in allowance and salary for his part-time help over the summers with the junkyard. It wouldn’t last him the full four years but it would’ve been enough to get him into his own place temporarily.

 

But…again, protection in numbers. And they still didn’t know exactly what Sam was, only that he wasn’t all natural. A day didn’t go by where he didn’t wish he was genetically a Singer.

 

Maybe that was why it was so hard to tell Jess he was adopted. Because for the life of him there wasn’t any other reason. It wasn’t like adoption was such a big deal. Except then she might have wanted to know if he’d ever thought about meeting his birth parents and…No.

 

If there was one thing Dad was good at it was honesty. Sam had known about the strange circumstances of his…birth since he was old enough to understand babies didn’t come from large beaked birds in the sky. He’d never lied to Sam about anything.

 

Granted, being eight years old and knowing a demon effectively bled you into existence with the help of a four year old boy, and then the boy’s mother who just happened to be a hunter turned you over to another hunter so you could be watched just in case you ended up a demonic batshit crazy fruit basket with poisonous fruit and twice as violent...it could be a little overwhelming…

 

but ever since he stopped freaking out about it he’s been grateful for the honesty. If Dad said he wasn’t worried Sam was going to turn in the night and begin nibbling on his flesh, then Sam believed him because Dad didn’t lie. If Dad said he loved Sam like he would his own flesh and blood, then Sam believed him about that too. It was nice having someone in your life that would always tell the truth, no matter what. It made all the lies and deception and everything else subversive about a hunter’s life tolerable.

 

Which brought him back to the beginning. When he thought about forever and he saw an image of Jess forty years from now holding the hand of the forty years from now version of himself… he knew he couldn’t do it like this, built on lies. He didn’t want to be his Dad in the way of a bachelor …but he admired everything else about the man and would be honored (and lucky) if he was tenth of the man his Dad was.

 

So it was clear. Either Jess had to know…or Sam had to break up with her. They’d get around to the bisexuality piece of things after they covered demonically incarnated.

 

 

Flash.

 

“This isn’t funny, Christian,” Dean growled. It has all the weight of a newborn puppy for all the good it does. Christian Campbell is a bitch, bar none. Third cousin or no the bastard is lucky he’s a continent away or else the next laugh he chuckled would be coming out of that second hole Dean shoots in his ass.

 

“I’m just imagining the look on Cousin Mary’s face when she finds out her predictions were true. Her lovely baby boy actually will be finally done in by the supernatural equivalent of Crabs.”

 

Technically Dean wouldn’t call them crabs. More like a funny pear shaped rash on his junk that just wouldn’t quit. He’d tried everything, creams, antibacterial baths, special healing lotions, burning out the impurities with rosemary and incense… Nothing.

 

At first he’d thought maybe he’d need to actually go to a clinic to get rid of the crap but then he’d connected the sudden burning, itching, swelling and appearance of a rash to the last case he was working on. It was a pretty cut and dry case, no pun intended. A classic story of woman of the house discovers her husband is cheating on her after thirty years of marriage while going down on him one night by finding the evidence of an STD (which one would be helpful to know right about now). In a fit of jealous betrayed rage she solves his problem by …well, biting off the problem, and then leaves him to bleed out on their marital bed. When she finally pulls back from Lorena Bobbit batshit crazy land she realizes what she’s done, she freaks out and does herself in. Which of course causes her to haunt the place for the next decade.

 

People. Whackos. Hadn’t anyone ever heard of divorce? Trial separation? Family counseling?

Anyway, it was an easy salt and burn. Dean spent the last twenty-four hours digging up Claire Burgens grave and setting her bones on fire. Case closed no more freaky.

 

He hadn’t realized Sir Bobbit had been hanging around the place too. Full of guilt and regret his spirit took it upon himself to randomly infect beautiful young women and allow them to seduce the next unwary guy. And then he left them a nice little present of what Christian so eloquently stated as supernatural Crabs. 

 

It was the most whacked out threesome Dean had ever had. And only a little bit because he hadn’t known he was having a threesome at the time. Julie-Jenna-Jennifer was so not worth this sort of aggravation. Fucker wouldn’t even disappear after Dean had gotten rid of his bones either.

 

“Tell me little Dean at least enjoyed himself, he shouldn’t have any regrets should this ultimately prove to be the very last rodeo he gets to ride.”

 

“Oh fuck you very much.” Dean was tempted to hang up the phone but he wasn’t an idiot and pride or no, he really didn’t want to be done in by a super-STD.

 

“Sorry, sorry, I’m through. Really.” Christian burst into another round of snickers despite his words.

 

“Just tell me how to get rid of them,” Dean gritted impatiently.

 

“Can’t help you there, Deany. My specialty is more along the lines of incorporeal beasts. Poltergeists, vengeful spirits, hell, cosmic plasma, I’m your man. Vengeful spirits imparting you with incurable jock itch? Not so much, no.”

 

“So what the fuck, man? You made me suffer through ten minutes of your bullshit for an ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m doing’? What the fuck is that?”

 

“Calm down, my young Winchester. I know someone you can call. He’s real big into research; he should be able to help you out. If he doesn’t know how to help he’ll at least know who to contact.”

 

“Give me his name, Christian. Or I swear to God--” The son of a bitch was getting an ass full of buckshot, and if he was lucky Dean’s aim wouldn’t ‘accidentally’ jump higher to his jewels.

 

“—Bobby Singer. You got a pen? I’ll give you his number.” 

 

Dean sighed and took down the name, his other hand incessantly scratching at his crotch.

 

 

Flash.

 

 

His cell began to vibrate interrupting his train of thought. Dream Warriors by Dokken blared out of his speakers. The only time that happened was when Dad was out on a hunt and had forwarded the house number to Sam’s cell.

 

Hmm. That was odd. He couldn’t remember Dad saying he had a hunt lately. Normally they checked in with each other before hunts, just a brief “this is what I’m doing, this is how long I’ll be,” in case Sam had to come out and rescue him.

 

Dad had hunted pretty regularly prior to 1993 and then a two day trip had extended to a week, two weeks, three, and ended with Sam thinking the only person in the entire world to love him was never coming back. Ten years old or not, Sam had been two days away from packing up his things, putting Rumsfeld on a leash, and going after him himself, when Uncle Rufus had dragged Dad back in, looking ten times worse for the wear. They still didn’t talk about it but after that Dad hadn’t hunted again until Sam started college, and when it was something serious he never forgot to let Sam know when he was about to go. So it must be a fact-finding trip or something. Anyway.

 

Sam cleared his throat and in his best professional tone answered the call. “Singer Salvage, this is Sam speaking.”

 

“Hey, yeah, I need to speak to Bobby.”

 

The voice on the other end was a raspy baritone. Sam placed him roughly in his twenties. Young, blunt and gruff with the barest hint of a mid-western accent…though with hunters it was always a hit or miss thing with accents. Half of them no longer had a home state and consequently picked up bits and pieces of the entire continental U.S.

 

Sam also detected the barest of strains in his tone which probably meant that whatever the problem was it was paining him right now.

 

“He’s not available right now, but I usually help in his absence. How can I help?”

 

“When will he be back?” Even as he was saying it Sam could feel the resignation in the other guy’s words. When, where, and what were chancy words in the world of a hunter. Answers were usually vague …or not what you wanted to hear.

 

“I’m not sure. But I’ve been doing more than taking messages for as long as I can remember so I really can help. What do you need?”

 

There was a pause of hesitation while the guy on the other side clearly decided how much he wanted to trust Sam with.

 

“I’m his son, whatever you were going to tell him; it probably would have ended up with me anyways.”

 

Which was not exactly true.

 

Bobby Singer had a thing about confidentiality. Unless he needed Sam’s help or it was a story that was mostly about him then he would go to the grave with the secret unspoken. It’d been an aggravating trait Sam had to put up with all preteen through adolescence.

 

Hell, it was still an aggravating trait. But he guessed raising a son with demonic ties made anyone a bit closed mouth.

 

Sam sighed gustily. “Look, dude, clearly you wouldn’t be calling unless you really needed help. Most hunters don’t. So I’m saying let me help, what’s the worst that could happen?”

 

“Yeah, all right. But if I hear one chuckle over there, just one, so help me –“

 

“No, of course not. I’m the picture of professionalism. Seriously dude, you should see me right now. Suit and tie, all alone in a little white office.”

 

“Sounds kinky. Shame I don’t swing that way. So there was this ghost…”

 

_And that was how Sam Deveaux met Dean Winchester. Everything else was just a matter of time and circumstance._

 

 

_Present Day_

 

 

The opening chords of ‘Behind These Hazel Eyes’ rang out from Sam’s cell. He let it get to the first chorus before answering just because it amused him so. From what he could tell, there were only about five albums that Dean listened to consistently - all of them were produced before either of them were born and none of them were Kelly Clarkson pop. Still, the one good picture Sam had managed to dig up on Dean Winchester (granted he was ‘Stephen Nicks’ at the time and it was a mug shot. Well, before Sam had hacked into Santa Fe’s correctional system and erased all trace of it) was so damned pretty he couldn’t help himself. Dean Winchester was probably the only bastard to ever make a booking photo look like a head shot for some modeling agency, and from the cock of his eyebrows to the curl of a smile on his lips…he knew it too. So, yeah, Kelly Clarkson. 

 

If they ever _were_ to really meet, Dean was probably going to kill him. It was so worth it. Sam’s only regret was he couldn’t tell from the picture if Dean’s eyes were truly hazel or green.

 

“Sam’s phone, this is Sam speaking. Sam would like you to know that _Sam_ is fully present and attentive.”

 

Dean snorted indelicately. “Yo, Sammy, I have the perfect plan for this weekend. You, me, Vegas and a beautiful lady that insists on splicing her young lovers up into tiny little pieces and digesting their nubile hearts. What do you say?”

 

Sam contemplated whether Dean was really that oblivious to the superfluous usage of Sam’s name or that much of a jerk. Probably a little bit of both. It was kind of cute. Or maybe Sam was just way over his head and couldn’t be held responsible for the mindless dribble his brain thought up in regards to Dean Jonathan Winchester.

_“You laugh and I’m never having one of these Life-time special chic flic moments with you again, Samantha, and we all know how much you live for them – I was named after the two most important people in my mom’s life, my dad and…my grandma”_

 

After that first conversation Dean had called back to let Sam know that the paranormal STD really did fade away like Sam had said it would with time and a salt bath and that “my junk’s all back to normal! Not even a little rusted,” which TMI except Sam couldn’t help thinking about what the owner of that deep burbon-smooth voice might carry around as ‘junk’ and… Okay, still TMI in a very very unhealthily ‘I’m so in over my head’ way.

 

On a whim, with beating heart firmly in throat, Sam gave him his direct number…just in case it came back. Or…if Dean just wanted to talk sometime or something. It was always good to make new connections in the hunting world, right? Right.

 

Dean accepted it gracefully, if gracefully was saying, “Aww, Sammy, you care. But quit thinkin’ about my junk, Sam, it’s weird. I feel all objectified and giggly.” And then returned the gesture with his own number.

 

Since then it was a friendship so beyond any Sam had ever experienced that he wondered if the fact his stomach alternately wanted to expel its contents or clenched down like a ball of molten lead could all just be attributed to how new everything was.

 

It was just…they _got_ each other, even when their opinions and motivations were so drastically different they might as well have originated from warring planets they still understood why the other thought that way and could …anticipate it. Yeah, that was the right word.

 

Sam had never met anyone he felt he could anticipate like that before. It was like Dean’s words were his own; he could feel them before they were uttered. And when they were uttered? They felt right. Every lame joke, every teasing lilt of sarcasm, every aborted flirt because Dean was the flirtiest being this side of cupid – and it didn’t mean anything, and he had Jess, and he’d never even met the other guy in person, and half the time he was teasing Sam right after sharing the details of his latest conquest (which was always so frustratingly straight) so it definitely didn’t mean anything to Dean but…it felt right.

 

They talked. And when they didn’t talk they texted. And now lately it was this bid to meet that always started out as a hunt.

 

“Yo, Sammy. Earth to Sam? I hear your breathing, you little stalker, I know you’re still there.”

 

“I’m trying to figure out a polite way of telling you you’ve lost your marbles. Again. Without being redundant.”

 

“You don’t have any excuse this time. There’s no big test, no frat parties, no little girlfriend who wants to celebrate the first time you batted your pretty little lashes at her, no upcoming papers…What’s the hold up, Sammy?”

 

Sam took a flustered moment to bask in the knowledge that Dean knew his schedule well enough to make a statement like that.

 

“I..um… don’t exactly do fieldwork, Dean.”

 

“What are you talking about you don’t do fieldwork? You’re a hunter, aren’t you?”

 

“Dad kind of wants me to focus on school before deciding what I want to do with my life, so…”

 

“Yeah. Mom wanted the same for me. Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering at Penn State. But I sure as hell snuck in a few hunts between finals. Come on, Sammy. There’s no one I’d trust to watch my back better than you. I need you on this hunt, dude.”

 

Sam blinked and gaped. They’d only know each other a couple of months. The rightness of the statement struck him deep. He felt the same way, short of his Dad there really wasn’t anyone he’d trust his life with more. But wasn’t this too soon?

 

 “Really?”

 

“Of course. We’re a team, you know we work. How many hunts have you already helped me out on? Come on, Sam! You have to do it, you have to! ”

 

Sam had never seen Dean in person but he could imagine him now. Legs kicked up, leaning back with a casual swagger, big puppy eyes as he teasingly plead.

 

“Fine. Quit your begging. I’ll go. But I have to be back by next Monday I have a pop quiz.”

 

“Not very pop if you know you’ve got it.”

 

Sam paused uncomfortably. They weren’t quite at the stage where Sam explained sometimes he just _knew_ things. They probably never would be.

 

“I suppose not, but I did appreciate the head’s up so I’m not complaining.”

 

“All right then, ETA 0’6 hundred. Pack your bags, Cinderella, I’m picking you up for the ball.”

 

The next sound was silence as Dean disconnected.

 

See, it was comments like that. Was Dean trying to insinuate that he was Prince Charming to Sam’s awkward princess? So not cool, by the way, Sam was not a girl. Or was Dean just being his smarmily not-funny self and Sam was overreacting for no reason?

 

Whatever Dean might say, it definitely didn’t make Sam a girl should he have possibly hugged his cell to his chest _briefly_ before setting it down.

 

***+++***

 

It’d been a while since he’d set foot onto a college campus, Dean had almost forgotten how much of an ‘other world’ it was. Like a city within a city, it threw off his ability to navigate and it wasn’t like they provided a map or any of the students had a clue where anything was via driving. Everything was ‘if you cut across a field here, or you can go in that building to get to the back of that other one’ damn little pedestrians. So he was late picking Sam up and the guy was already there sitting on a low wall with a backpack full of stuff leaning against him. At least, Dean was pretty sure that was Sam.

 

He hadn’t imagined, when he had taken the time to imagine his telephone friend, that real Sam would be so really really tall. But there he was as described, long brown hair curling around his face, red blazer tucked under his folded arms, the Muppets take Manhattan keychain swinging from his backpack handle.

 

“Jeez gigantor, you really ate your Wheaties as a kid, huh?” Which is how Dean introduced himself for the first time. No one ever said he knew when to shut his mouth.

 

“Hi to you too, Dean. Nice to meet you in person finally.” And there was the voice he’d gotten to know so well over the past few months. It totally fit his face. It was a dumb thing to think but it was about the truest thing he could right now. The voice fit, everything fit, Sam fit. And really, what the freaking hell?

                                                                                                                       

Sam stood and Dean couldn’t help his eyes from roaming up and up. His legs went on for miles. He was a skinny little nothing like Dean had thought he’d be, but there was an underlying power in each line of his body. There was an economy of movement he displayed that shouted as loudly as a neon sign “raised by a hunter over here.”

 

The dimples caught him off guard, the full smile and the crinkling of his eyes and the pure _Sam_ of him hit him somewhere lower than it should when looking at another dude.

 

And then Sam was climbing in and, hand to God (or whatever was up there running the show anyway), Dean felt his world tilt on axis for one vivid disorienting moment and then everything was buoying back into place like a gigantic finger had just held down the reset button and the laptop of life was cueing back up only without all the bugs. Or some such existential bullshit like that.

 

It just. It felt. Right. 

 

Dean talked to Sam because they clicked, they understood each other without words like only friendships born of years and shared traumas usually brought. So yeah they only met a few months ago but that kind of connection wasn’t surprising or anything. They came from similar backgrounds. Raised in the life, single parent households who preferred  research to actual fieldwork, only male children, they were even around the same age, only three or four years apart. That’s all it was.

 

The drive to Vegas went pretty smoothly. Dean had to stop himself from glancing over at his passenger every five seconds, but he wasn’t used to having a travel companion lately so that was to be expected. He ignored how enthralled he felt about the sunlight climbing across Sam’s cheekbones, or the rose-red of his lips when he bit down while in thought, or the fact that hearing him laugh was so much greater in person than it ever was on the phone.

 

He felt like he knew him and wanted to know more, everything, at the same time.

 

“It’s kind of weird we never met before,” Dean voiced his thoughts after nearly an hour and a half on the road. Well, some of them.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“The hunting world’s pretty well connected, you know? And my mom makes sure we stay in the loop. She’s got this whole thing about maintaining ties and family being about more than just blood. But it’s just been the two of us for so long I guess she wanted more for me when I was a kid.”

 

“Yeah. It’s just me and my Dad too, you know that already. But there’s also Aunt Ellen, and Uncle Rufus –“

 

“Ellen Harvelle? ‘The Roadhouse’ Ellen?”

 

“Yeah, you know her?”

 

Dean rose an eyebrow. Did he know her, really? “Her kid’s practically my little sister. See? Weird.”

 

Sam sat back in his seat with a little smirk. “Oh, so you’re that Dean.”

 

“That Dean? What Dean? What does that mean, _that_ Dean?”

 

“The chauvinistic, cocky, arrogant, walking manwhore Dean –“

 

“Way to stroke a guy’s ego, Sammy.”

 

“—that Jo would give her right lung and both arms to kiss just once.”

 

“Oh. Well, yeah, I’m that Dean.” Sounded about right.        

 

“I have to admit, you are pretty hot.”

 

Dean swallowed. Sam had directed the last comment to the pane of his window, expression hidden by the sunlight flooding his face. There was no good reason for his stomach to be flopping like it was.

 

“’Course I am,” Dean responded, and if his voice was a little hoarser than usual he dared Sam to comment on it.

 

“I don’t know if I’d give up an organ for you but, you know, to each his own.”

 

Dean blushed and rubbed at the back of his neck. “Oh, shut up, Sam,” he mumbled.

 

The rest of the trip went smoothly. And if he felt like a fourteen year old girl with her first high-school crush, he dared Sam to say something about that too.

 

Needless to say the monster was killed and Sam made it back for his Monday quiz.

 

After that Sam went on every hunt he could, which mostly amounted to weekends and breaks, but they made do. Dean hadn’t had someone to ride shotgun since he’d bought the Impala and officially started going on hunts solo. It was …nice to turn to the right and be able to see a solid presence in the next seat over.

 

And after a few weeks Dean wasn’t fucking around when he said solid. Sam had taken up going to the gym ever since that first hunt and the trip-on-the-tree-branch-and-fall-over-himself stunt. It was definitely paying off. Little skinny Sammy tall as a beanpole and twice as light was suddenly looking like a man. A man built like a brick shithouse.

 

Dean couldn’t help noticing that his six pack was edging closer to a pack of eight.

 

He didn’t know what to do with all the ‘feelings’ that noticing that was getting him.

 

***+++***

 

They’ve known each other four months, one of them in person, before Dean got around to asking Sam out for a beer.

 

Despite an early flight - which at this point he might as well just not go to sleep if he had any hope of actually catching it - Sam immediately agreed.

 

He’d noted a disconcerting pattern of agreeableness when it came to ideas presented by Dean. Sam fully intended on saying no and then his mouth opened and what actually came out was ‘Yes, Dean. Anything you want, Dean. How can I please you, Dean.’

 

He was frankly a little disgusted with himself.

 

‘Course if he hadn’t agreed he also wouldn’t be sitting here doubled over in laughter, beer threatening to either drown him or pour out of his nostrils, as Dean related his first hunt in graphic humiliating detail.

 

Dean’s cousin Christian grinned from his corner of the bar, nodding along and occasionally correcting some of Dean’s more wild embellishments.

 

“I don’t know who was closer to pissing themselves, to tell you the truth, me or mom. Neither of us would say though, she didn’t want to terrify me and I didn’t want her changing her mind and deciding I wasn’t old enough. The whole time this idiot over here,” Dean used the half-empty beer bottle to wave in his cousin’s direction, “was whispering the encyclopedia of untimely deaths A-Z in my ear every time she turned her back.”

 

“Think I got up to S for ‘skinned alive’ before Cousin Mary caught me,” Christian confirmed.

 

A sudden laugh burst from Dean, “she spent the next weekend teaching you the meaning of that phrase if I recall correctly.”

 

Sam’s chuckles wound down enough for him to ask, “how old were you?”

 

“Fifteen.”

 

Sam thought about that. Being fifteen years old, old enough to start thinking of yourself as a man, young enough that you were actually still a little kid, simultaneously scared to death and wanting to prove yourself.

 

“How about you,” Christian Campbell asked, full attention on Sam. Sam still wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Not that the guy wasn’t friendly enough but Dad had made it a practice to keep Sam away from face to face contact with other hunters. They weren’t exactly known for their tolerance. So it was a bit disconcerting to suddenly be flooded with so much interest.

 

And exactly the opposite of how he felt when Dean was the hunter interested.

 

“My first official hunt wasn’t until Dean, actually.”

 

“What? No way. You’re shittin’ me, Sammy.”

 

“Nope. Dad really really prefers if I’m restricted to the research stuff and I kind of …well after I turned ten I think he’s only been on half a dozen or so hunts and before that Jeeze maybe double that ..If. So I never really thought about going on one myself.”

 

“Way to pick his cherry,” Christian guffawed. “You always were a virgin magnet, Dean.”

 

Dean flushed red and he rubbed at the back of his neck.  Which seemed to be a pretty standard response from him when Sam had embarrassed him.

 

It never stopped being cute.

 

***+++***

Their next hunt together Sam had to beg out. It wasn’t the first time, once Sam had a paper due and two times before that claimed a hangover so bad riding in the car would have been the worst motion sickness but really he’d had a dream the nights before where his presence and, let’s be honest, his amateur status as a field-worker had been such a distraction to Dean he’d caused him to slip and fall and get electrocuted by a rawhead on one occasion and dive in front of Sam to take the full brunt of a flying mirror in another scenario.

 

Sam was still dreading the day he had to tell _Dean_ to call off a hunt. What exactly would he say?

 

It made him remember the legend of Cassandra, doomed to prophesize catastrophe and yet never have the important people believe him. Not that he thought Dean wouldn’t believe him, his was worse, he wasn’t allowed to tell him they were prophecies in the first place. The thought of being so impotent made him sick to his stomach.

 

This time though it was spring break and that wasn’t what was happening here.

 

“You sure you’re alright, Sammy?”

 

Sam held his head in his hands wincing at the bright light pouring in from his bedroom window. Normally Dad remembered to hang the really heavy curtains that blocked everything out but he hadn’t been expecting him so he hadn’t had time to get ready.

 

Personally, Sam was of the opinion parents should just leave your room the hell alone when you went off to college. It wasn’t like he wasn’t coming back.

 

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I’ll be okay. It’s like a seasonal bug or something.”

 

Beneath the thrum of his aching head, Sam could feel Dean’s hesitance. “If you want I could drop by…”

 

“Nah, it’s okay. Just gotta sleep it off, I swear.”

 

“Yeah, alright. “ It was clear from Dean’s tone that not only did he not believe Sam, there was going to be a whole care package ‘anonymously’ waiting for him back at school. Dean was so sweet it was unbelievable.

 

“If I don’t see you this time around, stay safe, okay?”

 

“Always do, Sammy. Take care of yourself, man. We’ll catch up next time.”

 

Dad gave Sam a _look_ as he hung up. “Don’t suppose I have to ask who that was.”

 

Sam smiled goofily, despite the pain cascading down through his jaw. Dad gruffly turned away hiding his return smile.

 

Spring break for every other college student in the country was a time to go wild, let loose, explore the world and sow your oats while you were still young enough to be forgiven for inappropriate transgressions. Normally Sam spent it back home with his father learning how to set a devil’s trap. This time he was bedridden, recuperating from what Dad termed ‘psychic tension.’

 

It was when Sam held back too long and his psychic crap started building pressure in his head trying to force its way out. Dad usually had him use them somehow under guarded conditions which usually involved bending and unbending spoons with his mind in the safe room. This time had struck too quickly though. Probably because he’d been spending most of his free time with Dean and all the rest at school and he had to hold himself back rigidly in both arenas.

 

“How’s the head, kiddo?” Dad asked softly. Between his hands he twisted his ball cap, the only tell he had that he was a lot more worried than he let on to Sam.

 

“Throbbing Beethoven’s third.”

 

“At least that has a nice beat.”

 

Sam cracked a smile. It hurt his face. “We’ve got to figure this out, Dad. What happens if I go for to long and it breaks my brain or something?”

 

He kept the smile so Dad would know he was mostly joking, but really it feltlike his brain was breaking.

 

“I know. We’ll figure it out.  We always do.”

 

Sam nodded his head in agreement and lay back on the couch. He was too long for it but it smelled the same since he was five and playing cops and robbers with him and Rumsfield as the robbers and his Dad the FBI agent that was always one step behind. It smelled like curling up into his father’s arms after a bad dream – irony for you – and being rocked back to sleep to ‘the little engine that could.’

 

“I’d like to tell Dean. He could help. He’s really good at figuring stuff out. Did I tell you about the rock-salt ammunition shells he invented?”

 

 “Only three times …this week.”

 

“Well. Good. Because it’s a cool idea. He  also rebuilt a Walkman and turned it into –“

 

“Yeah, I know. You told me about that too.”

 

Bobby sat down next to Sam, slapping his legs off the couch to make room. “You know you can’t tell him,” he chided gently. “He’s a hunter—“

 

“You’re a hunter. You took me in and gave me a home and loved me.”

 

“I’m a lonely old man who already lost someone he loved through ignorance over how the supernatural world works. I was cautious.”

 

“Maybe Dean would—“

 

“We can’t risk it Sam. I can’t risk it. You’re too important. You’ re my son as sure as if you were my blood. We’ll figure this out and then maybe one day.”

 

“Yeah. One day.” Sam sighed and covered his eyes with his arm.

 

He remembered Brady of freshman year in college and all the questions he’d ask and things he’d insinuate. ‘How’d you know there was going to be a quiz today, Sam? Wow I’m glad you were late, if we were on the highway five minutes earlier that could have been us in that accident. How do you know that girl just wants her sorority sisters to think she’s a virgin?’ and how hard it was to pretend no matter what he did. Dean wasn’t stupid. Dean was the total opposite of stupid. He was going to find out. He still missed Brady but he hadn’t been in love with him. So this was –

 

Oh wow. Oh crap. Dean was going to break his heart.

 

“I really like him, Dad,” Sam mumbled low.

 

“I know.”

 

“A lot. He…he feels right. He fits.”

 

“I know.”

 

“He feels more forever than Jess but he’s not, is he?”

 

Bobby didn’t answer, instead he lay a calloused palm lightly against Sam’s knee.

 

 “One day maybe,” Sam sighed. Then he was asleep.

 

***+++***

 

“Dean when you have a moment?” Mom passed a hand over his head as she walked by, carelessly ruffling the ‘just rolled out of bed after a night of passionate lovemaking’ hairstyle he’d taken the last thirty minutes perfecting.

 

He wasn’t going to think about why it was so important Sam saw him looking his best.

 

Dean patted it back into place and shrugged on his leather jacket. “What’s up?”

 

Mom took in the jacket and his weather proof boots. “Where’re you off to tonight?”

 

“Just a hunt. Sam’s in town so he’s coming with me on this one.”

 

Mary rose an eyebrow. “Again?  That’s the fifth hunt this month he’s been on with you.”

 

“I’ve only been on five hunts this month,” Dean pointed out.

 

“That’s what I’m saying, Dean. He’s been on every single hunt. That’s kind of a lot, don’t you think? Who is this kid?”

 

Dean shrugged and looked away for a beat so she couldn’t read anything in his eyes. “You’re the one who’s always emphasizing ties and networking. I’m just networking.”

 

He always tried. It never worked.

 

“Is that all? Because the way I hear about this Sam is kind of how I heard about Rhonda Hurley in sixth grade. Do we need to have the safe sex talk again this time about boys, Dean?” And then suddenly she was teasing, grinning at him, bright and happy. His Mother was evil.

 

“Oh gross, Mom. Thanks, now that’s stuck in my head.”

 

“That’s what your words are saying, but your face isn’t saying  ‘gross’.”

 

Dean swallowed and turned away to leave. “Don’t wait up, I might be awhile.”

 

“Be careful, baby.”

 

“Always am.”

 

“With your heart too, yeah?”

 

“Ditto.” He saluted her and left as quickly as he could without his pride shrieking that he was running away.

 

The welcoming interior of his baby was some comfort and did much to calm him. The sight of Sam’s warm smiling face, as Dean pulled up at the airport, had his stomach feeling like he wanted to vomit all over again. Shit. She was right, this was Rhonda Hurley redux.

 

 

The hunt turned out to be a bust. The poltergeists they thought they had were really some teenager vandals. Eighteen hours of driving for what was effectively a bunch of egged houses. People, man, they sucked. Dean threatened to shoot the little punks on principle, Sam laughing his ass off at the expression on their faces.

 

They were an hour and a half outside South Dakota, the sun breaking the sky open in orange and golds as the morning came, when the adrenaline rushing through Dean’s body got to be too much.

 

The road spread out before them emptily, Black Sabbath played low on the tape deck, Dean’s fingers tapped out the beat on the steering wheel absently.

 

Sam was reclining against the passenger window – his window – fist propped up under his chin and his serious face on. They’d gotten food at the Burger King fifteen minutes back but neither of them had felt like eating yet.

 

Dean made  a sudden decision and pulled off the side of the road.

 

“What’s going on?”

 

Dean shut off the car, his baby’s gentle rumble cutting off with a purr. “Come on, Samantha, let’s go watch the sunrise over a romantic meal.”

                                                                                                                                        

Sam looked at him askance. “Of cold hash browns and congealed sausage?”

 

The morning sun caught Sam’s eyes and burst them into a rainbow of colors. Not any of the improbable ones like pink or purple, but golds mixed with flecks of blue and clear brown with hints of green flashing through.

 

Dean climbed out without answering because he was honestly afraid he was going to make an ass out of himself. He tended towards the more insensitive obvious humor when he was nervous and shit he was kidding before about a romantic picnic but now he wasn’t so sure.

 

He yanked a throw out of the trunk and spread it out under a huge tree away from the road. Wildflowers sprung up in clumps of violet and white around them.

 

His stomach was rolling with nerves.

 

Sam shut the door behind him and crossed to Dean in three long steps. He lowered himself to the blanket, scooting close to Dean’s side because they were two big dudes and it was a tiny little throw.

 

Dean hadn’t thought this through. His arm tingled hot where Sam pressed against him.

 

“I can safely say this is the weirdest thing we’ve ever done.”  Sam said thoughtfully while retrieving his breakfast sandwich from the soggy paper bag.

 

“Not too bad though, right?” Dean asked. His throat hurt like he was coming down with something and the nerves in his thigh were jumping.

 

Sam took a huge bite and swallowed before answering. “Nah, it’s kinda fun.”                           

 

He kept licking his lips between each bite, trying to catch every crumb. His arm kept rubbing against Dean’s chest as he brought the food to his mouth and lowered it again.

 

Dean really really hadn’t thought this out.

 

He flopped backwards, his own food uneaten, and stared at the quickly lightening sky.

 

Sam finished and lay back beside him, their heads nearly touching. “Actually wasn’t too bad of an idea. It’s nice to get out the car for a bit.” His voice was soft, content.

 

“Hey no talking bad about my baby,” Dean murmured automatically.

 

“M’not. She’s a cool car. About the only one I can actually fit in. Just it’s nice to stretch.”

 

Dean hummed back in response. The cool air was turning warm on their faces. If he let himself he could fall asleep, right here, Sam close beside him.

 

Then Sam let out a long moan, stretching above his head and ending with a huge yawn, head tilted so close to Dean’s face he could feel his breath on his cheek. The combination of sensations, not to mention the visual of Sam’s eighteen layers of clothing all rucking up together to reveal the hard expanse of his abdomen, shot straight to his dick.

 

His heartbeat kicked up as he realized he might not be hard yet but if he kept laying here he was well on his way to an impressively awkward erection.

 

So of course he made his second poor decision of the day.

 

Abruptly Dean bounced up. “C’mon, Sam. Spar with me.”

 

Sam blinked at him. “What?”

 

“Get up, spar with me. Let me see what you’ve got.”

 

“Dude, seriously? It’s too hot. And I’m tired.”

 

“Bitch bitch bitch. You know what I’m hearing, Sammy? A whole lot of ‘Dean you are king, you’d totally kick my ass in a fight. I’m so scared.’”

 

“What? No! There’s not even a chance, I’ve got like half a foot on you, munchkin.”

 

“Two inches, you liar. And those string beans you call arms couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag, longer reach or no.”

 

Sam scowled. And even that was attractive. Dean was so majorly fucked. Christ, the last time he’d been so hot for a pretty pair of eyes there was  an even prettier pair of tits attached below.

 

“Seriously, Dean? Are we seriously doing this?”

 

Dean rose an eyebrow and gave him his cockiest grin. “Unless you’re scared.”

 

“What are we twelve?”

 

“Your face is twelve,” Dean mocked. His eyes danced.

 

“That _might_ have made sense if it wasn’t so juvenile.”

 

“Your face might make sense if it wasn’t so juvenile.”

 

“Oh that’s it, you’re so going down!”

 

Sam’s legs went on for miles as he rose to his full height. 

 

They wrestled in the grass like preteens, slipping and sliding against each other as they grappled for a solid hold. Sam was new at this but he was such a fast learner; Dean’s a pretty good teacher too. And even though he’d been using these holds his whole damn life, he was kind of distracted by how freakin’ good it felt to have some part of his body touching Sam’s.

 

‘Course that didn’t mean Sam had any chance in hell of actually pinning him. Dean rolled on top and slammed Sam’s wrists down above his head, using the surprise and the full weight of his body to keep him there. 

 

“Do you admit defeat, Sammy?”

 

Sam laughed breathlessly beneath him, his chest rising and falling. “Never,” he proclaimed.

 

“Big talk for the one of the bottom.”

 

“I don’t know, I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve.” Sam’s dimples flashing, mouth wide in a mischievous grin, was the only warning Dean got before suddenly Sam was bucking up into Dean’s body on an undulating slow grind of his hips.

 

Dean rolled off faster than if he’d been plunged into a deep fryer. He adjusted himself in his pants because a little aroused had suddenly turned to rock hard.

 

“No fair, you big perv.”

 

If Sam laughed any harder he was going to break something. Dean smiled despite himself.

 

The rest of the trip back was uneventful, except for how driving an hour while fully hard was a bitch. Neither he nor Sam mentioned anything about it, except for Sam’s random happy giggles whenever he glanced over at Dean’s scowly ‘I’m turned on and I can’t do anything about it’ face, the big dork.

 

When they pulled up at Sam’s house, Sam leaned over and touched Dean’s arm gently, a heartbreaking smile on his face. “Thanks for today, I had fun.”

 

Dean was a half-second away from saying ‘you make it sound like a date’ when the thought hit him…maybe it was. Maybe he wanted it to be.

 

Oh Christ, was it? Did he ask? Did he kiss him goodbye? Was this the lean in and Dean was missing all the signals? Should he lean in?

 

Should---

 

Dean slammed his head back against the headrest as Sam disappeared into his house, the moment lost. 

 

 

 

 

Taking a walk in the woods took a whole new twist when you realized the guy you were walking with was quite possibly the only guy in the world you’d go homo for, after twenty-six years of happy comfortable hetero living.

 

They were uncharacteristically quiet. It was probably Dean’s fault, he knew he was throwing ‘talk to me and lose your tongue’ vibes but he couldn’t help it. Every time he opened his mouth to say something he felt like he was a syllable away from barfing instead.

 

It was obvious Sam had just caught Dean’s mood and was respecting the silence.

 

Not even their first hunt together when they’d barely known each other, and hadn’t yet figured out any of their tells, had been this awkward.

 

Dean let Sam get a little ahead of him as they walked. There were so many positives about pulling up the rear, not the least of which the great view of Sam’s broad shoulders and strong back. Dean had always been a legs and ass man, but Sam’s shapeless baggy jeans didn’t show much so he was making due with what he had. He wanted to stick his hand in Sam’s back pockets and pull him close. But they still hadn’t even kissed yet and Dean didn’t know how to get to _that_.

 

The feeling of eyes on him broke his train of thought.     

 

"Someone's following us, Sammy."

 

Sam, the poor oblivious bastard, looked around. Full circle, with a careful little spin. Amateur. Dean was still glad he was here with him.

 

"Where?" Sam finally asked.

 

"I don't know. I can't see anything ....or hear anything. But it’s just this feeling I've got."

 

“What kind of feeling?”

 

"The kind of feeling that means there's something else out here with us. Dude, keep up."

 

Sam made his frowny bitch face that said he was one taunt away from giving in to being pissed for the rest of the evening but he didn’t want Dean to know. Or he was about to go flouncing off in a huff and Dean would have wasted an entire morning’s trip by acting a douche. It was hit or miss with Sammy some days. The really stupid part was he was only acting like a douche because everything else in him said to pull him to the ground and kiss him breathless or at least until his heart stopped pounding in his throat and his hands stopped dancing with nerves. Dean was ruining the best friendship he’d ever had by developing a sudden and completely out of character homoerotic attraction for said best friend. Fuck his life.

 

“What I meant by that is my Spidey senses are tingling,” Dean amended after calling himself twelve different kinds of fool. 

 

"Azazel?"

 

"No no no. Different than him. Foreign. "

 

Sam laughed. "Dean, man, you can't get more foreign than Azazel. He was a fruitcake in life and has just concentrated the crazy in death.”

 

Dean put up finger to mouth to signal silence. He listened intently for a moment, half expecting to hear the crunching of wet leaves in the distance. "Not that dangerous...just foreign."

 

He could see Sam decide not to mention that he never said anything about them being dangerous, switch tactics and try again with, "So it’s not a dangerous sort of following?"

 

"Not yet that we can see, Aren't you listening to me, Sammy?"

 

"Yeah, it's just you aren't making much sense."

 

Dean didn’t get a chance to respond because the source of his discomfort was suddenly on them

in the form of a little girl that once towered over Sam but now he dwarfed her by a good foot.

Her heart shaped face twisted in pain as Dean backed her up against a thick tree trunk, but she was smirking at him and shimmering incandescently at the same time.

 

“The name’s Ava. Ava Masters.”

 

“Well that’s great Ava, Ava Masters. What are you doing out here in the middle of the night? Why are you following us?”

 

“I’m not following you, I’m following Sam.”

 

Sam leaned in closer and saw that yes it really was her. “Ava? What the hell are you doing out here? It’s a little far from South Dakota, don’t you think?”

 

“You have to come with me, Sam. There’s so much I have to show you, time’s almost up and we have to get this show on the road.”

 

“What? What do you need to show me? What—“

 

The world exploded in information. Sam slammed his eyes shut and covered his ears with both hands but it did nothing to keep the world at bay because it was coming from him, coming from within him.

 

“Oh oh god, no look out,” Sam moaned quietly.

 

“Sam! Sammy, wake up!”

 

Sam woke slowly to the sound of Dean’s voice in his ear, the feel of Dean’s body wrapped around him. It felt nice and if he wasn’t feeling so muddled like cotton was filling up all his orifices …he’d enjoy the rare bit of tactile comfort he was being offered.

 

“Sam, what the hell just happened?”

 

He looked around groggily and saw they were sitting in the Impala though now it was pulled over to the side of the road and Dean had half climbed inside the passenger seat with Sam slumped over on him.

 

“I d-don’t,” Sam had to grab his head to stop the ringing in his ears. There was blood dripping from his nose and Dean was holding up a tissue to it to help stop the flow.

 

They’d been on their way to a hunt. He thought. It was so hard to think right now.

 

“Don’t lie to me, Sam, what just happened to you? How can I help if I don’t know what the hell is going on?”

 

His words were sharp but Dean’s tone stayed level and calm. Sam could feel the rumble of them in his chest.

 

Sam pressed him back a little. He couldn’t think, he couldn’t breathe.  He wanted to lay in Dean’s arms and tell him to make it all go away. He’d never had a premonition while wide awake before. Or one that confusing. Who the fuck was Azazel?

 

“There’s nothing to tell, Dean. I passed out due to all the stress we’ve been under lately. Lots of people pass out, there’s nothing weird about it. The blood is just because I have very dry nasal passages. It can all be explained.”

 

Normally they were pretty straight forward: A plus B happens which makes C happen and so Sam had to take D steps to avoid the whole thing.

 

“Yeah? Then explain why you were moaning and flopping around like Nemo gone topside? I’ve  seen unconscious, Sam. I’ve done unconscious. That wasn’t just unconscious.”

 

He never experienced it as a different person before. He was always just Sam. And more importantly, was that really how Dean felt?

 

“I had a dream…you were in it…” Dean watched him carefully, mouth a thin line. It was really serious if he wasn’t taking the obvious opening.

 

“I…we were on our way to the cemetery,” Sam continued slowly trying to sort everything going on in his brain. “…but we were walking through the woods, and I could hear you. I could…it was like I was you. You were upset because …” Sam trails off wondering if this was really the way he wanted to reveal his crush. “I don’t know why.  But we were bickering a little and then Ava suddenly shows up—“

 

“Ava?”

 

“This girl I know back home. We’re sorta friends but she’s kinda …I don’t know ‘off’ there’s just something about her that’s always made me uncomfortable so it’s more of a ‘hi, bye’ thing.”

 

“Okay. Me, you, your groupie. Alone together in the woods. This is starting to sound like the set up of a porn I once saw.”

 

Sam smiled because if he was joking then nothing was as bad as it seemed. 

 

“She’s saying all this stuff about how I need to come with her, and you’re suspicious and then…I don’t know everything just sort of …exploded. Then it like images flashing in my brain, all this stuff, a fire and a baby and eyes that burned yellow and …I don’t know a lot of just everything, everywhere. Most of it probably junk.”

 

Dean sighed. “Has this ever happened before?”

 

“What, a nightmare?”

 

“This was a little more than a nightmare, Sam. You’re bleeding here.”

 

“I—no. No, I don’t know what this is.” He had to turn away because while it was the truth there was also so much more that it was actually/basically a lie by omission.

 

“I’m fine,” he reiterated instead.

 

“You’re fine,” Dean repeated. “Yeah, sure. Right.”

 

The slam of the car door throbbed through his head like hangover sensitivity and Sam could tell Dean was pissed when climbed in his side and put the car back into gear. He wasn’t surprised that they were turning around heading back to his hotel room instead of the hunt, but he was too tired to protest. Which maybe said it all.

 

Sam allowed Dean to help him get into bed. Or onto rather as he was unceremoniously dropped on top of the covers, shoes and everything still on.

 

He feigned sleep while Dean retreated to the other side of the room and set up vigil watching over him like only his father had done before.

 

On the edge of sleep, Sam could hear Dean make a phone call.

 

“How’s the not so secret lover?” A man’s voice, slight accent, amusement so clear in the tone Dean must know him. And then Sam can recognize his voice, it’s Christian Campbell. Sam is going to worry later on why he can hear a complete conversation without Dean putting it on speakerphone.

 

Dean responded immediately. “Fine, I guess, but I won’t be able to make it over tonight so I guess she just has to make do with you. Oh, wait, you didn’t mean your wife?”

 

The other man chuckled a little but didn’t rise to the insult. “The way you deny it just convinces everyone it’s the truth. Me doth think the lady doth protest too much.”

 

“Me doth think you’ve been imbibing too much liquor lately, Shakespeare. You don’t drink your own product, remember that, Christian. Thought I taught you that much if nothing else.”

 

Christian chuckled, “whatever lets you sleep easier at night, man.”

 

“As fun as it is to shoot the shit with you Chatty Cathy, this particular call has a point.”

 

“Let me hear it.”

 

“I have a friend that’s going to need some protection—“

 

“Dean-o you know the rules!  A rubber before is ten times Plan B the day after.”

 

“Shut your pie-hole one-nut, I’m being serious.”

 

“I’m listening.” And he was, all the tease had sobered out of his voice.

 

“I’d ask Mom but you know how she worries. There’s some pretty serious psychic shit he’s got himself mixed up with and I don’t know if maybe he has the gift and is just now coming into it or if he’s attracted someone’s attention but there’s been a number of incidents lately and I want him safe. You’re the only other person I trust to not completely fuck this up. What can I do?”

 

Sam shivered beneath the heavy blanket Dean had laid across his body.

How much longer could he pretend to Dean he was normal. How much longer would he be allowed to pretend?

 

 

A few weeks went by quietly and the next time they were together was back in California, Dean visiting Sam for a change just to visit. The way his eyes ran over Sam’s body, assessing, it probably had a lot to do with making sure Sam’s brain remained in his head. They didn’t talk much about what happened that night, but it was there sitting between them.

 

They didn’t talk about this thing building between them either, but they touched more. Dean ruffled his hair and slid his hand around the base of Sam’s neck, Sam bumped shoulders and patted Dean’s thigh as they sat next to each other on the couch. They both leaned on each other, fell asleep on each other’s shoulders, and on one notable occasion Dean used Sam’s lap as a pillow while they mocked CSI Miami.

 

Dean stayed two weeks, slept in a hotel because Sam’s small dorm couldn’t fit three people and he’d never wished for off campus housing more.

 

Somewhere in there Sam forgot he had a girlfriend, and only remembered when Jess called him one morning during a breakfast run. Dean was inside grabbing an everything bagel for himself and a fruit salad so he could tell his Mom he was eating somewhat healthy, an onion and chives bagel for Sam with a black coffee because Dad didn’t believe in watering down his beverages and at the time Sam was learning what to drink he’d also wanted to be exactly like his Dad. 

 

***+++***

 

Dean found Sam moping by the car when he came back with both hands full of food. Everything about him said he was too depressed to live, from the tips of his floppier than normal mop of hair (which meant he’d been running his hands through it again like he did when he was stressed) to the tops of his inward pointing pigeon toes. The cell phone hung limply from his left hand. Considering the caller id had been flashing “Jess” before he’d left, and considering he’d been with Sam every moment of every day for the last week and a half except for the time it took them both to sleep (and sometimes even then they ended up talking each other’s ears off over the phone till one of them passed out) and he’d only seen her once…It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had just happened but still, it was a pretty shitty thing to do, break up with your significant other of two years via cell phone. 

 

Pretty girl but Sam was so out of her league.

 

"Can I join this pity party, or is it by invite only?"

 

Sam looked up briefly then waved for Dean to do what he wanted. Just so happened to be that what Dean wanted was to recline against his baby, elbow to elbow with his second best friend in the world (even to himself he knew that status was a bit of a lie, Sam had been inching out  Christian ever since their first conversation).

 

"I've got no one, Dean," Sam said quietly. Dean elbowed him in the side, a gentle nudge that was more of a manly caress than a hit.

 

"Hey, and what am I?  The dashingly handsome imaginary friend?"

 

Sam looked him over to him. "Well, one out of three ain't bad. You are my friend."

 

"Hey! I’m freakin’  adorable and you know it."

 

Sam cracked a small smile. "Maybe a little,” he allowed.

 

Dean felt his stupid heart start thumping again.

 

“Anyway, you know what I mean, Dean. I’m not hunter enough to enjoy a life of solitude and I’m not normal enough to spend my days with someone who loves me, all of me. I’m never going to have that with someone, you know? There will always be that piece of me I can’t explain, and even if I could unless they’ve lived through it they’d never understand."

 

Dean got that. He did.

 

"Think about it, other than the Harvelles how many hunting couples do you know?”

 

Not a whole hell of a lot. And no one that didn’t end in tragedy. “My grandparents hunted together. Made my mom. Had a family and a life. Don’t go counting yourself out, Sammy. One day…there’ll be someone there for you.”

 

Sam stared at him hopefully with those big eyes. “Yeah, you think so?”

 

“’Course I do. I know so.” 

 

Sam gifted Dean with one of his rare slow smiles. It brought both his dimples out and set Dean’s heart beating faster.  Stupid stupid heart.

 

Part of him…all of him wanted to say, what about me, Sammy? What if I could know you and love you and be your someone? Would that be enough?

 

Instead he smiled back and looked away.  He hadn’t even had the guts to tell Sam that it wasn’t so much that suddenly other men did it for him as since Sam no one else did it for him _but_ Sam. How was he supposed to tell him that were it possible he’d gladly carry his  
future children.

 

He felt like he was literally growing a vagina just thinking about it. Christ, could he be any more of a harlequin damsel about this shit? A hand drifted down to Dean’s crotch and surreptitiously adjusted.  Nope, everything still there.

 

 

 

They dragged along like that for another few months. Flirting like crazy but never closing the deal. Which at this point Dean was so out of his comfort zone, he wasn’t even entirely certain what ‘closing the deal’ would even look like. Did they kiss? Did he ask Sam out on a date. Did they walk around town like a couple a douches PDAing all over the place and swinging their linked hands. Christ, how much of a girl did it make him that he really really wanted it. All of it.

 

Dean figured a good first step might be meeting the parents. He’d heard that meant something. On tv or something. It totally didn’t go anything like he’d expected.

 

He started with his Mom because he figured it’d be less stress on _him_. Dean was not the meet the parents sort. Besides, Mom had been pretty cool about the whole suddenly gay thing – though Dean had never formally admitted it to her that he was probably a little less straight than they’d always figured. And he’d known she’d wanted him to bring someone home since he was seventeen years old and started one night standing like other people went out on dates. He’d thought she would have been thrilled.

 

Instead she was this strange psycho woman, alternately quizzing Sam on everything from his favorite breakfast foods to his ability to repeat an exorcism forwards and backwards from memory alone. He got the holy water in the iced tea, but ‘accidentally’ pouring the whole gallon of the stuff over Sam’s body was a bit much.

 

They had escaped to Dean’s childhood room  (also where he slept when he stayed over) and he was trying very hard to act like he didn’t  care that Sam was half naked in the same room he spent half his time choking the chicken.

 

“So…that was awkward,” Dean said. Better to get that out of the way.

 

“ _That_ was your mom?” Sam’s voice was a little high pitched and Dean didn’t blame him.

 

He tried not to stare as Sam yanked his soaked shirt off over his head. Those pectorals should be illegal.

 

“Yeah, normally she’s a little less on the weird cross between June Cleaver and Glenn Close,” Dean answered distractedly. He wasn’t sure what was worse, Sam in soaking wet clothing clinging to his body, Sam without clothing, or Sam in _Dean’s_ clothing.

 

This was all some dastardly plan to kill him. And Mom was in on it.

 

“You look like her,” Sam said, coming over to sit beside Dean on the bed. It was a gigantic king’s sized foam mattress that he couldn’t get back out the door once he’d got it in and took up three quarters of the room so that there was just enough to squeeze by to enter, exit, and lock yourself up in the closet. Considering at the time he’d splurged on it, he had just topped 6 ft and had growing pains like a mother, it’d been completely worth it.

 

Now with Sam breathing down his collar, all solid 6 ft plus of him, Dean was on the brink of losing his mind.

 

“Who you calling a woman, Samantha?” Lame but the best he could do while dizzy with lust and fighting an erection.

 

“No I’m serious. You two look alike. It must be nice. You know, to look at your parent and see yourself.”

 

“I never really thought about it. I guess the ladies do like my lashes but otherwise I don’t go around exactly categorizing my features, Sam. Besides, I’m sure there’s something you share with your Dad. Clearly not height, or personality, or …hair. But there’s gotta be something. ”

 

Dean hadn’t met Bobby Singer in person but he had talked to him often enough on the phone and Sam definitely had enough pictures of them together all over his dorm room. He was such a little Daddy’s boy it was ..it was freakin’ adorable.

 

“There’s not. I was adopted,” Sam shared tentatively.

 

Dean stared at him blankly. “Oh. Oh! That...explains so much really.”

 

Sam smiled that smile that meant he was really relieved and always made Dean feel like he just overcame an impossible feat.

 

“Yeah. He’s the only family I’ve ever known. Sometimes I’d wish there were more of us, you know? Like cousins and aunts and uncles It felt kinda lonely sometimes with just us. He did try though, Aunt Ellen helped. But mostly we kept to ourselves.  

 

“Wish I’d known you back then,” was what came out of Dean’s mouth without his permission.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Yeah. I could’ve been like…your big brother or something.”

 

Dean followed the movement of Sam’s adam’s apple as he swallowed.

 

“Or something,” Sam breathed.

 

And this was it. Heart thudding wildly in his throat, Dean could tell this is the moment they’ve been building up to since, Hell, probably that first conversation.

 

They were leaning forward, meeting each other half way, and Sam’s almond eyes were half-lidded, and suddenly their mouths touch. Softly, gently, _briefly_ – from anyone else it would have been a chaste ‘see you later’ peck and Dean wouldn’t have even thought about it again. Like everything else, this was different with Sam. His lips felt like they were on fire.

 

Sam moaned as he watched Dean’s tongue come out to touch his bottom lip, licking the flames away and it wasn’t even on purpose.

 

He had game; a different woman in each of the continental United States could have provided detailed explicit proof that he had game.  Dean never felt more like a naïve kid than in this very moment.

 

Sam was the one moving in again and suddenly they were kissing properly. It was different than kissing a woman…there was the stubble for one. And the way Sam cupped his face with a gigantic paw, engulfing half his face and tilting Dean where he wanted him. That was – that was something totally different and little Dean was enjoying it a helluva lot more than he’d expected.

 

Like on the verge of coming his pants, liked it.

 

“Fuck, Sam,” Dean breathed. “We can’t—I---My mom’s downstairs.”

 

“Mmm, mkay. Alright, we won’t,” Sam agreed and then went ahead and laid Dean out on the bed, spread eagled on his back, and got to work on his neck.

 

“Shit,” Dean hissed. Who knew Sammy getting all manly and domineering was such a turn on.

 

“Fuck, I’ve been dreaming about this,” Sam moaned. “Wanted this, you, for so long, you won’t believe, Dean.”  

 

Sam wrapped himself around Dean. One thick thigh came up between Dean’s legs, pressing in on his groin. Dean closed his legs to keep him there, buried his hands in all that shaggy hair and let the strands slide through his fingers.

 

They kissed for a very long time, each time one of them broke away to gasp someone else sucked spit-slick lips back into the other’s mouth.

 

Sam dragged a huge hand up Dean’s belly, pulling his shirt up as he went. 

 

Dean’s whole body burned, every nerve alight. Sam ground his pelvis against Dean’s hip, rocking them steadily towards climax. Dean felt pulled along for the ride, wrapped up in a tsunami of feeling, he was going to drown if they didn’t stop. Sam’s tongue ate him from the inside out, their tongues tangling, their breath mingling, the only thing they could taste or feel or breathe each other. 

 

Dean’s spine melted; his cock throbbed in his too close jeans. “Wait, Sam, wait.”

 

Sam pulled back immediately, his pupils were completely lust blown. “What’s wrong. Did I do something?”

 

“No. Nothing. This is great. I just…this is my first time. With a guy.  And I’m trying to kind of like…reconcile the different sensations. And not you know…”

 

Sam gave him the ‘understanding eyes’. “Freak out?”

  
Dean scoffed, annoyed with himself. “Cream my pants like a kid.”

 

Sam buried his head in Dean’s shoulder and shuddered. “Oh, man, you can’t say things like that.”

 

Dean lay there, tangled in Sam, trying to figure what he could say.

 

A fierce pounding on his bedroom door made them both jump apart, Dean sitting up and reaching for his .45 before recognizing the voice.

“Dean! It’s getting late, can you please escort your friend home? Dean! Dean!! Can you hear me?!”

 

Dean collapsed back on the bed with a sigh. “Okay, yeah, Mom.”

 

He hesitated before looking over at Sam. That wasn’t how he imagined this going. Sam was too busy grinning at him full force, both dimples winking.

 

Sam leaned over for another kiss which Dean readily accepted. If they walked out right now they weren’t fooling anybody. At this point he didn’t even care.

 

“Come on, Sammy, I’ll take you back,” he mumbled into his mouth. Sam was staying at a hotel while he was in town, but his plane left the next morning for California so that wasn’t going to be that much longer.

 

As they got to the door, Dean impulsively took Sam’s hand and twined their fingers together. Sam squeezed him back, grin widening. They stayed that way all through the drive.

 

By the time Dean got back in, he was exhausted, horny, confused, horny, and really really annoyed. He’d kind of hoped this meeting would have gone well. If for no other reason than Sam was quickly becoming one of his most important people and he kind of wanted the two people who meant the most to him to get along.

 

Instead crazy psycho Glenn Close moment.

 

When he got in the house was completely dark. Mom was in the living room and he could tell by the tilt of her head that she had been crying. All those other feelings went completely out the window as fear took up precedence.

 

“Dean we need to talk,” she said thickly. “There’s something I haven’t told you that you need to know.”

 

He sat down.

 

 

 

 

Dean was pissed with him. Sam could tell. Sam would sort of have to be a special kind of idiot _not_ to get the fact Dean was majorly pissed.

 

Which he wasn’t. And besides, he had all types of experience with people hating his guts. When he had been a kid it started as whispers by the lockers, someone taking a wide berth when passing him in the hall, intercepted notes that were quickly torn to bits and crumbled.

 

At first Sam thought he was having a straight man’s freak out, but it lasted too long. Dean, the Dean he’d known for almost two years, would have had a moment of lucidity where he took his head out of his ass long enough to return one of the dozens of calls Sam had made to him. But no, this was complete radio silence. This was anger.

 

This was not how he chose to believe adults behaved. Sam called ‘Bullshit.’                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

 

The thing with Jess he could understand, after two years of dating he probably should have waited until he was back at school to tell her face to face that they should break up, but he’d been moved by the moment and didn’t want to keep lying to one more person one second longer. So he kind of expected her to avert her eyes and keep walking when he saw her in the halls.

 

What he didn’t expect, what he didn’t get, what he refused to believe was Dean’s AWOL status for the last six weeks. If the hunting world wasn’t so well –connected, as Dean called it, he would have thought he’d been offed by some big bad and nasty. Instead Jo assured him Dean was doing perfectly well. Holed up with some little whore – okay that’s not fair. She was probably more of a skank than a whore.

 

Sam was going crazy. After their last day together, after kissing each other like it meant something, after humping Sam’s leg with full intentions of getting off…after holding his hand the entire way back to his hotel…

 

How did he go from that to ignoring Sam’s calls?

 

Abruptly, Sam realized how quickly Dean had turned into his only friend. He was a junior next semester, last year this time he and Dean played darts and drank beers in celebration despite Sam’s underage status.

 

Now there was this nothingness where Sam left pathetic messages on Dean’s voicemail and

 

“Dean, you fucking coward, you don’t get to just check out on me. If you don’t want to …if you only want to be my friend, we can do that. I don’t care. I just…I miss you, man. I just miss you.” Sam trailed off and hung up. What more was there to say that hadn’t already been said.

 

Didn’t matter, Dean wasn’t answering.

 

It took a hunt to jolt things back on track. Assisted by his dad.

 

“There’s some rumblings of possession heading your way,” Dad called that night to let Sam know. Of course it was also meant to keep him as far away from it as possible. They only good thing about Dean’s abandoning ship was that Sam wasn’t butting heads with his Dad anymore about hunting.

 

“Oh?”

 

“Your …young man has expressed some interest in it. If you’ve got any sense in that thick twitterpated skull of yours you’ll steer clear of it, Sam. I’m not going to order you to, you’re a big boy, but I would really appreciate it if you just let this one slide.”

 

Sam flushed at the ‘your young man’ and sulked at the rest. Truth was Dean wasn’t his anything anymore.

 

“We’re not even talking right now, Dad.”

 

Bobby grunted acknowledgement and warned him away one final time anyway.

 

So of course Sam found himself downtown, staking out an apparently abandoned warehouse. The only thing demonic he’d caught wind of was the neon pink logo declaring ‘Princess Palace Now Open For Business’ despite its crumbling exterior.

 

He didn’t realize how boring stakeouts could be without Dean to entertain him.

 

“What are you doing here, Sam?”

 

Speak of the devil. Six weeks and he was still just as gorgeous: dark leather jacket, steel-toed boots, beautiful broad shoulders tensed and angry.

 

Sam straightened from his crouch and faced Dean head on. “Oh, look, he _can_ speak.”

 

Dean’s face clouded over storm brewing. “Why are you here?”

 

“I’m a hunter, Dean. This is what I do.”

 

“No, you’re a researcher. _That’s_ what you do. Go home before you get yourself hurt.”

 

Too late, Sam thought. Some of it must have shown on his face because Dean’s was softening.

 

“Look, just go home. I got your messages, we’ll talk, just not now.”

 

“Dean…”

 

“Sam. Go home. You’re only making it worse.” And now he just sounded weary. That’s not what Sam wanted. He didn’t want to have to beat him down to make him talk …to make Dean love him.

The will to fight him on this left Sam’s body. He’d only shown up because Dean was here. He wasn’t a hunter, he was a researcher, a college student playing at hero. A half-demon playing at normal.

 

Sam turned to go home and encountered a wall of resistance. He had time for one incredulous thought - How the fuck with all his psychic abilities and Dean with all his experience did they both miss a demon sneaking up on them -  before he was slammed backwards into Dean’s surprised embrace.

 

“Too late, little hunter.” The wall of resistance was a tiny brunette, 5’2 and eighty-five pounds soaking wet wrapped around a demon’s inky essence.

 

Sam looked at her and wondered if that’s what was inside him. If she knew the one that made him. If Dean would still want to touch him if he knew there was a part of him that was a part of this. She opened her mouth and Sam made a fist against his thigh, slowly uncurling each finger until his palm splayed flat.

 

She had no irises, no pupils, no whites - everything that made up normal eyes were sunken in pitch black - but he could still see her surprise. He could feel her screams as she died, wisps of black smoke trailed from her orifices (ears, nostrils, gasping mouth, eyes)  trickling slow like little puffs of black rain clouds. He closed his fist and it poured from her, rocking through the poor host’s body with enough power to jerk her off her feet. When it was done both Sam and the girl lay on the ground, powerless.

 

“Is she still alive? The girl, I mean,” Sam whispered hoarse.

 

Dean sent him a look but went to check without argument.

 

“Yeah. She is.”

 

Sam titled his head back and closed his eyes. “Good.” He felt like he’d been run over with a mac truck, his entire body throbbed. His head was spinning.

 

“Good? That’s it? You mind telling me just what the freakin’ hell that was?"

 

“I don’t know what that was.” About the only piece of honesty he had to give.

 

Behind his closed eyes he could feel the weight of Dean’s silent stare, it felt like condemnation.

 

And then it was over. And Dean was marching away.

 

“Dean wait! I don’t want to leave it like this, we have to talk.”

 

“What do we have to talk about? You’ve been lying to me from the start, Sam! ”

 

“Dean, I…” He stopped, paused by the realization that anything he said now would only prove Dean’s point; anything he said would be a lie. ‘I’m not lying to you.’ Lie. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ Lie. ‘I’m sorry.’ Lie. Well, okay, he didn’t like doing it and sometimes he was sorry but for the majority of the time it seemed like a prudent and necessary course of action.

Sam sat silently, guiltily.

 

“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

 

“Dean…”

 

“I think you should go home now, Sam. I’ll see you later.” Only…the way he said that, Sam wasn’t so sure he would ever be allowed to come back.

 

“But Dean, I…”

 

“No, Sam, I can’t do this right now. Go home, I’ll speak to you later.”

 

It was Brady all over again, mad and _hurt,_ and driving away… only worsebecause no one could do righteous vulnerability, beaten and betrayed, like Dean, though Brady came damn close sometimes. Plus, Dean had a faster car and his license for like _years_ , he could get away better.                                                                        

“It’s not like I _like_ it, or that it’s even about you. I’m not trying to hurt you, Dean. I just can’t tell you. You have to understand that.”

 

The look on his face plainly said, ‘I have to understand no such thing.’

 

“No! Dean, no! What am I supposed to do? Just walk up to you and go, ‘Hey, Dean, you know, you were right about that whole seeing the future thing. Sorry for lying to you but I’m really a freak with a penchant for predicting things that might come true but only if they’re ghastly enough and someone’s brains are liable to end up on the ceiling fans, never anything nice and no I never know when it’s actually a dream or when it’s a prediction. And oh, by the way, I’m just like all those other freakishly deviant things you hunt for a living please don’t shoot me. Sorry about that, didn’t mean to lie. Wish I could have told you before. So, you know, just in case, no vowing my eternal damnation or shooting through with rock salt if you please. And kindly keep the freaking out to a minimum. Us freaks are kind of sensitive about that type of thing.’ Yea because that would have been just _so_ ea--”

 

Then it stopped. Halted with the realization that Hey, yeah, you are saying all this out loud. Stunned into silence by Dean Winchester’s shocked, pale, face. He always wondered how Dean would look thrown completely off his game, bared of defenses and masks and those irritating know-it-all smirks, only he never expected to find out like this. And Oh. Wow. Oh Fuck. Oh fuckity fuck fuck oh wow. That wasn’t supposed to come out.

 

That. Was …really not supposed to happen. It wasn’t in the plan. Was it in the plan? No, wasn’t in the plan. Wasn’t in the plan at all. At. All.

 

Huh.

 

Sam Deveaux, you’re looking kind of screwed here, buddy. And not in the pleasantly post coital mind bliss sort of way. Nope, completely asexual reproduction by mitosis splitting in fucking half kind of screwed.

 

Fuck fuck fuckity fuck. Sorry Dad, remember when you asked me to never tell anyone? Remember how careful we were trying to be recently? Well, it sort of all came out in a tantrum. Whoops.  Yeah, I know, I thought I was done with that at five too.

 

And the funny thing? Even though he had plenty of reasons to be currently freaking the fuck out (what was Dean going to say…what if Dad was right and he wasn’t going to understand and would want to stake him through the heart, Holy hell what was his father going to say--- he was never going to let him out the house by himself again, like ever) the only reason that kept repeating over and over in his head was, Dean is going to think I’m a monster and hate me forever.

 

Okay, maybe not funny ‘ha ha’, but definitely funny strange.

 

Somewhere underneath the rushing of his ears, Dean was speaking to him.

 

“It’s okay. Sammy, it’s okay, breathe. I already know. Breathe.”

 

Sam came back to himself with heaving breath and elevated heart rate and all the leaves he could see swarming around them like busy insects. 

 

Dean watched them poker face on, knelt down to Sam’s level and bracing his shoulders with a strong arm. “What are the odds that you’re not the one making with _Fantasia_ , right now?”

 

“Slim to none.”

 

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

 

Sam sat up and the leaves dropped. They looked like some twisted summer version of A Night Before Christmas with green instead of white.

 

“What do you mean you already know?”

 

“I mean that night we…the last night we talked, my mom told me some things about you. About us.”

 

“What kind of things.”

 

“A lifetime of psychiatry’s worth at least. Come on, I’m not doing this here with Rosemary’s baby over there as a witness.”

 

Dean helped Sam to his feet and guided over to the hidden Impala one careful excruciatingly painful step at a time. While they walked Dean called in an anonymous tip about a young girl in need of emergency services.

 

“Blocked phone number,” Sam asked idly.

 

“Better. Scrambled transmission. I’m calling from China right now, by way of Australia by way of Nantucket.”

 

“Ahh.”

 

Dean helped Sam slide into the passenger’s seat, arranged his legs carefully and shut the door behind him before climbing into place behind the wheel. The gentle nudge and bump of the vehicle pulling off made Sam bite down on his lip in pain.  

 

“You’re part demon,” Dean began, gritted his teeth and shoved it out there for Sam to confirm or deny.

 

“That’s what I’ve been told.”

 

“You’re also part of me.” And this time the grimace was clear as day.

 

Sam eased forward, the world was spinning and he wanted to vomit and he wanted Dean’s arms around him until everything stopped. But it didn’t look like he was ever going to get anything he wanted. “What?”

 

“I helped create you. It was my blood that bastard used to mix him up a human.”

 

“You were that four year old?”

 

Dean looked away from the street long enough to glance at Sam’s expression. “You know?”

 

“My Dad told me. I mean, he wasn’t there he didn’t have all the details, but he got the gist.”

 

“I was that four year old.”

 

“Sorry.”

 

“Hey! What for? You don’t have nothing to be sorry for, Sam. You weren’t even alive, you didn’t make any of that happen.”

 

Sam shrugged. “Someone should be sorry.”

 

“Or maybe we should just be thankful you were born. However it came to pass.”

 

They drove in silence, Dean’s hands white knuckled on the steering wheel, Sam’s body bent in two as he pressed his pounding forehead against the dash.

 

“What does that mean for us,” he finally asked when he could make the words pass. “Does that…are we…are we related?”

 

Dean sighed explosively. “You’re from my blood. You’re part of me, but it’s not like you’re …my child or anything. I was four for fuck’s sake.”

 

“I’m part demon too.”

 

“Yeah? And you’re all Sam. It’s just how you were formed, it doesn’t turn you into a monster. You’re the same person I met two years ago before we knew anything about your creation.”

 

“I hope so.”

 

“Hey, Sam. You’re part me too. I know so.”

 

Sam reached across the way and Dean met him in the middle until their hands clasped. They drove the rest of the way like that.

 

 

 

 

Inevitably no matter how they began, they’d end up like this, Sam laying half on Dean pressing him down into some horizontal surface with the weight of his body while he guided Dean’s hips into riding Sam’s thigh. Inevitably. Not that Dean was complaining but fuck the boy was bossy.

 

Inevitably Dean would slam on the brakes somewhere around the time Sammy’s hand dipped below his waistband, Sammy’s tongue laving his ear. Sammy’s monster dick grinding intimidatingly against Dean’s stomach, or pelvis, or palm.

 

“Sammy, I want to. I do, I just –“

 

“Is it the demon thing? The fact your blood made me?”

 

Well wasn’t that a kick in the nads, who knew Dean had a kink about that. Dean sucked in a deep breath and moved Sam’s wandering hands away from his hot zones before he said fuck it all and ended face down ass up with a cock buried in his sphincter. “No. It’s just, it’s kind of new and…that’s kind of a really big dick you’ve got on me right now, Sam.”

 

Sam laughed. “Um…sorry?”

 

“No, no it’s okay. You’re proportionate, I guess. You’re just…a really really big boy.”

 

Even giggling and blushing red embarrassed Sam couldn’t hide the swell of his chest with pride. Fucker.

 

“Want to take it slow?”

 

“Yeah. Let’s do that, slow sounds good.”

 

“Slow it is.” Sam started kissing him again. He moaned into Dean’s open mouth and sucked his tongue inside.

 

“Aww, fuck, Sam.”  

 

Dean’s cock was drooling precome, the wet mess making the fabric of his jeans stick to him in a very uncomfortable way. He was scared they’d end up fucking if he took it off. And really? Really? Since when was Dean Winchester scared to have sex?

 

He kind of felt bad for every woman he’d ever ‘coaxed’ into having sex with him, nothing sleazy just a little blatant flirting, a few ‘accidental’ brushes of his body against pivotal parts of hers to really get her crank turning, a spine melting kiss here, a soul-scorching application of friction there…

 

It felt awesome. Awesomely awesome. But it also felt like having all the air sucked out of you by a succubus. So. Yeah. Guilt. Possibly even a little just desserts.

 

But Sam never really pressed. He never touched anything Dean didn’t want touched, never held him down longer than Dean wanted to be held down. Never got annoyed, or pushy, or acted like a douche. After a month of heavy petting that ended in separate trips to the bathroom to jerk off over the toilet (at least that’s what Dean did and assumed the flushing meant when it was Sam’s turn) and Dean might have been a little douchey had the roles been reversed.

 

Dean wanted to punch anyone who had ever questioned Sam’s humanity. There was no way that boy had a singular demonic bone in his body, blood or not.

 

And they were awesome. Sam finally decided on a major – prelaw. He wanted to defend hunters and the victims of supernatural phenomena against the limitations of an ignorant criminal justice system. Mostly because Sam had an unfair amount of guilt over that little brunette that had been denuded of demon guts a month ago was sitting in prison waiting for her day in court and once she finally got it probably would be rotting away for the rest of her life for crimes she didn’t do. Still, it didn’t stop Dean from being proud.

 

His boyfriend the lawyer.

 

Everything was awesome. So of course that was when it all went to shit.

***+++***

 

It was getting worse. The headaches, the dreams, the random telekinesis without Sam’s consent. And to add kerosene to the fire he was having episodes where he blanked out and couldn’t remember what he’d been doing.

 

To say Sam was scared was to say the sky was a little blue. They hadn’t tried the demon-exorcism trick again but he could tell Dean itched with curiosity.

 

Whenever Sam voiced a worry about eventually ending up a monster in a Sam-sack, Dean dismissed it with:

 

“Being a monster is a choice, Sam. You’re not going to make it, and I’m not going to let you. Mom once met a whole nest of vampires who only drank animal blood despite the temptation of human sacrifices at their feet. They chose it, and you’re choosing it every day whether you know it or not. It’s going to be okay.”

 

But how could he choose if he didn’t even know what he was doing?

 

Dean let a hand rest on Sam’s shoulder, called him back to the moment. “What’re you worrying about now?”

 

“Nothing for once.” Sam blushed a little and looked down then promptly peeked back up at him through heavy bangs because he couldn’t stay away not even for that long. In the background some pilot for some sitcom Sam hadn’t been watching chattered on. “Just sitting here thinking how lucky I am to have you in my life.”

 

“Not just you,” Dean acknowledged. He was right in front of Sam now, leaning against the kitchen island of Dean’s tiny little apartment. Sam could reach out and run his fingers down the thick muscles of Dean’s upper thighs, drag his hands across his abdomen and feel Dean’s rock hard abs.

 

He clenched his hands into fists by his side instead. “No?”

 

Dean’s eyes danced. He didn’t bother responding with words, simply pulled Sam into his space and yanked him down into a kiss. They’d gotten seriously good at kissing over the last month.

  

It was like electric sparks ignited as they touched. They both moaned and Sam wrapped Dean in his arms, held on with both palms grabbing Dean’s ass.

 

Pressed together without even room for air, Sam could tell Dean was already hard. This was a little further then they’d gone so far, his heart thumped between them as one beat.

 

Dean sighed into the kiss and let Sam tilt him how he wanted. Once, tipsy off of shooters and their tongues, Dean had told him he loved it. He’d always been the aggressor in his relationships, the one who pursued, the one who initiated. There was something freeing about letting it all go and someone else taking control. Something fucking hot about it too.

 

Sam never forgot. He was already throbbing as if he’d been fully erect for hours instead of minutes. Dean turned him on so bad he was going crazy. Better this way than any other.

 

Dean leaned away breaking their kiss wetly and Sam went after him, chasing the taste of him with his unsatisfied mouth.

 

“No. Wait,” Dean said. He was still pressed up all along Sam’s front but now he was shifting away.

 

Sam’s heart sunk. Dean refused to meet his eyes. That was never a good sign.

 

“I want to go further this time. Not – not everything,  but we can do more, okay?” Except for maybe when it was.

 

“Yes and yes,” Sam agreed eagerly. There was really no point in playing it coy not at this point.

 

Dean laughed, trailing off on a guttural moan as Sam matched his words with actions and quick as anything yanked open Dean’s fly, slid his hand down Dean’s pants, and took his dick in hand.

 

“Fuck, Sam,” Dean hissed, hips already bucking.

 

“Every day we were apart I dreamed of this. Of you right here, your pleasure in my hand.”

 

Sam pumped his fist smearing his palm with precome. Dean’s dick filled Sam’s entire hand, it felt perfect nestled in his palm. Sam let it slide in and out his grasp building momentum as Dean’s groans grew louder despite his attempts to hold them in.  

 

“You don’t know how hard this has been, Dean.  I couldn’t even jerk off properly.”

 

“You’re doing a pretty good job of it,” Dean huffed, voice strained as he tried to keep the sounds of his sex quiet.

 

The skin of his cock was so soft and moved up and down as Sam pumped, the blood infused in the organ kept it stiff as a metal pipe though and it steadily leaked precome into Sam’s hand and through his fingers.

 

Dean threw his head back as Sam played with the head further down, tickling him with fingers as he pumped and reveling in his ability to squeeze the come from him. It had been so long from the very first moment they met. Sam never wanted to stop touching him.

 

Finally he pushed his hand all the way down, leaving Dean’s cock alone to wave in the cool air above his open waistband and bat against Sam’s arm as it passed, leaving strings of precome on his sleeve. Sam fondled at Dean’s balls, let his middle finger ride at the crease of his ass without pressing in, then in a moment of sheer brilliance pressed up and in behind his balls to massage his prostate from the outside.

 

Dean stiffened, clutching Sam’s arm with both hands to keep it there and came all over both of them.

 

Spunk flew everywhere, his pulsing slit threw semen out in thick long strings. The muscles in Dean’s neck strained and contracted as he ejaculated.

 

For a very long time.

 

“You needed that huh,” Sam asked chuckling when he was finally done

 

“Christ, Sammy,” Dean gasped, idly he wiped a pearl of come off Sam’s sleeve with his index finger. Sam grabbed his hand automatically before he could find somewhere to wipe it away and stuck his thick finger into his mouth, sucking it clean.

 

Dean hissed as if he’d been hurt, his beautiful green eyes going dark.

 

When there was no trace left, Sam let his finger slide out and lowered himself to his knees and cleaned up his spilled jizz with his tongue.

 

Dean’s head flew back to thwack against his wall as Sam licked his sensitive organ with short kitten licks, making sure to gather up every last bit I could find – when exactly had they moved back to the wall anyway?

 

His spunk was salty and starchy and sweet all at the same time. Sam let the taste marinate on his tongue, wondered how weird that made him. Was he up there with animal-sucking vampires, or was this only a little kinky?

 

When he was clean except for the bare traces in his pubes and further back where Sam couldn’t reach without pulling his pants off altogether, and which he wouldn’t be doing without Dean’s express permission, he sucked Dean back to hardness.

 

“Shit, sweetheart, suck my cock,” Dean said. He clenched Sam’s shoulder with one hand and used the other to cup his head, providing some support for Sam’s neck as he bobbed on his dick. “Yeah, that’s right, put that cock in you, Sam. Suck it good, baby.”

 

Sam got caught up in his words and let his mouth ride Dean, tongue undulating against the thick vein that ran up from root to tip, pressing precome faster and faster onto Sam’s tongue.

 

Dean’s hips pumped, restrained against my face, each thrust sending his cock an inch further down the back of Sam’s throat despite himself, and Sam knew he was close. Even the taste of him was getting thicker, precome flowing into wet spunk.

 

Sam swallowed around him forcing his entire length down his throat and that was it. Dean was gone.

 

He let out a loud guttural grunt and came down Sam’s throat. Sam breathed hard out of his nose and concentrated on swallowing it all, not missing a drop.

 

Dean sighed long and hard, wobbly, as he finished and his cock softened enough to slip out with a gentle tug.

 

“You’re amazing,” Dean said reverently. He looked at Sam with awe in his eyes and Sam felt himself blush. Again.

 

Maybe weird animal-sucking vampire and normal kink were one and the same.

 

Dean pulled him to his feet and brought him into another kiss, sucking the taste of his own cum out of Sam’s mouth so that they could share it.

 

“So fucking amazing,” Dean said.

 

Sam whimpered as he pulled him firmly by the hair, pressing their mouths as close as possible and turning the kiss fierce. All that pent up lust and longing went into this kiss, both their eyes shut tight and reveling in the taste of each other.

 

When they broke apart they were both panting and Sam had to adjust himself before he exploded.

 

“Let me,” Dean whispered on Sam’s lips. And then he was reaching for Sam’s waistband and Sam was coming in his pants.

 

Dean laughed. “Least it wasn’t me.” Then he was too busy kissing away Sam’s embarrassment and leading him to bed.

 

The next morning he woke alone, Sam’s side of the bed cold and empty.

 

It took Bobby Singer arriving on his mom’s front steps for Dean to realize he hadn’t just been ditched in a belated “I’m not good enough for you, Dean, don’t touch my evil monster tentacle cock” freak out. Which would have been just like Sam. Also, his cock was the freaking size of a tentacle. A big tentacle.

 

“He got a call from Ava Master’s last night, 1:03 am.”

Sam must’ve called her back after Dean had fallen asleep. If he recalled correctly they’d been pretty busy at 1:03. And at 2, and at 3. All the way to a little after 5:30 actually. The boy had shit for stamina but he could get it up again like a little energizer bunny on Viagra. Ahh, to be nineteen again.

Dean felt a little hysterical.  

“He couldn’t have called her back until after 5:30 this morning,” Dean added to the conversation that both their parents had been so conveniently excluding him from.

 

Bobby Singer shot him a look with narrowed eyes and huffed an annoyed breath. “Not asking how you know that.”

 

Dean gave him a sheepish grin. “Yeah, it’s probably better not if you don’t.”

 

Mary Winchester reclined on her sofa, legs crossed, arms folded, blonde hair twisted up into a bun with a fierce look on her face. “Listen, Mr. Singer, you can’t stop all your pussy-footing. We know he’s a monster. I looked him up, I remember the baby that was created in my kitchen nineteen years ago.”

 

Bobby’s whole face turned three shades and he spluttered indignantly. Dean hovered between him and his mother because something told him her gender was the only thing staying Bobby’s hand.

 

“Lady the only monster I see here is you. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? I raised that, you don’t get to tell me who he is.”

 

Dean was torn.  On one hand, Go Bobby! On the other hand, he was talking to his mom. He wisely decided the best course was to shut his mouth and let Mom handle it but he stayed close.  

 

“You don’t seem to understand what we’re dealing with, Mr. Singer.”

 

“No, you don’t understand. Sam is my _son_. I raised him, I loved him, I held him after every nightmare that he wasn’t good enough or human enough or normal enough to love, I wiped every tear after every headache his godforsaken powers gifted him, I cleaned up his scrapes and sent him off to school. I know everything about that boy. You had him for one day, decided he wasn’t worth fighting for, and now you think you get to decide when he dies? Well, excuse me, Mother Teresa, if I don’t think you have that right.”

 

Mom’s face clouded over and Dean was pretty sure Bobby’s gender wasn’t going to stay _her_ hand.

 

“Azazel,” Dean broke in. “The last time I heard the name Ava Masters Sam was saying something about the Azazel.”

 

Mary frowned. Hard. “That’s the demon’s name. The one who created him. If the mythologies are to be believed he’s a high king of hell, one of Lucifer’s own right hands. I don’t know what he wants with Sam but I can guarantee it’s nothing good. I’ve been hunting him all your life, Dean, and I’ve never even gotten close. Then suddenly the same week his creation goes missing--”

 

Dean winced at the way she said ‘creation.’ Sammy was so much more than that.

 

“—I find this. This is the only way to kill him.” Mary slammed an ordinary looking gun down on the table between them.

 

“It’s The Colt,” she answered to Bobby and Dean’s joint looks of confusion.

 

“ _The_ Colt. Like the story you used to tell me?”

 

“Not just a story, honey. And I’ve had it all this time, the bastard hand-delivered it to me wrapped in my mother’s protective sigils the night he killed your father. I can’t think this is a coincidence.”

 

“But what does it have to do with Sam?” Bobby asked, getting to the point.

 

Dean suddenly felt nauseous. His head was swimming and it was getting hard to see.

 

“Everything it has everything to do with him. He might not have started this mess but Azazel wants him for a reason and I’m not just going to hand deliver some telekinetic psychic freak over to a d—Dean!”  

 

Mom and Bobby rushed to Dean’s side and he gasped out his pain on his knees. When he could wheeze in breathe he pushed out the words he needed. “It was Sam. I know where he is. He needs me.”  

 

***++***

Ava Masters. Ava fucking Masters. She was a fucking demon. That’s what had always felt off about her, that’s what Sam could sense without understanding. Sam couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. How many years of fake friendship for the chance of him answering the phone when the time was right, saying “yes, Ava, I’ll help” when she asked it of him.

 

How many years of lies.

 

Ava Masters was a fucking lying demon and Sam was beyond pissed. He was furious.

 

Her empty corpse lay across a headstone. Sam couldn’t feel guilty about that, she’d been dead long before he’d extracted her demon.

 

Besides, he had more important things to consider. Like holding closed the gates of hell.

 

“You are my creation. You’re a part of me,” Azazel pushed at his mind.  

 

Also, his creator was a douche with an overblown ego and who liked to hear himself talk. Sam wasn’t even curious by this point, he was a furious blob of bored to fucking death just kill me already if you can’t shut up.

 

“No,” Sam answered firmly. “I’m a part of Dean.”

 

She’d whisked him away clad only in boxers (and thank god it felt strange to sleep naked or else he would have arrived like that) and dropped him off in some cemetery for an end of the world special or something equally anticlimactic and cliché.

 

“I gave you life, Sam, when your own mother would have denied you.”

 

“Mary Winchester is not my mother. You made sure of that.”

 

Azazel’s yellow eyes flashed in his otherwise underwhelming human face. “I let you grow strong with humans so that you would know how weak and insignificant they are. So you could feel their  frailties and despise them.”

 

“Humans are some of the strongest people I’ve known,” Sam denied, thinking about Dean. Thinking about his dad.

 

“You are to rule hell by my side, boy—“

 

“No! I don’t want hell. I don’t even want to rule earth. I just want to live my life. I’m not letting you open this gate and I’m not letting you hurt anyone else. That’s what I have these powers for, that’s why I can do the things I can do, so I can stop your filth from spreading.”

 

Sam’s eyes seared bright white, like two twin beams of the headlights from an oncoming car. His hands outwardly extended he pushed back with all his force, shoving against his creator with half of him, holding back the gate with the other half because apparently a half-demon could open it without The Colt which Sam hadn’t known and Ava hadn’t told him and he was so very sorry about that. Not about removing her from her human-suit but that ignorantly he’d believed her when she said the stone needed to be opened telepathically and naively he had done as she’d asked before his better sense took over. And he wasn’t sure he was strong enough to do both, and he really needed Dean.

 

“You are mine! You—“

 

A shot rang out and Azazel was silenced. Forever.

 

“No one owns Sammy but himself, you son of a bitch.”

 

Sam didn’t have time to rejoice in hearing that familiar rumble. “Give me the gun, Dean!”

 

A woman yelled out on top of him, their words colliding together. “Don’t give it to him, he’s one of them now. Look at his eyes!”

 

“Dean, the gun! I need it!”

  
Dean didn’t even pause to think it over. He tossed it high over his head and it sailed in a perfect arch into Sam’s waiting hands. Sam crossed the length of two tombstones and sunk the metal in the gate key, locking it back.

 

Then he sunk to his knees, power drained.

 

Soft steps approached him. He’d know those bow-legs anywhere. “You came for me.”

 

“’Course I did. I’m batman, you’re robin.” Dean nudged him with his shoulder tentatively. “You powering down there robin or do I need to give you minute?”

 

“This is who I am, but not everything I am.”

 

Dean watched him work through it silently.

 

“And you love me anyway.”

 

They hadn’t gotten around to ‘love’ yet but Dean smiled and Sam knew he was glad Sam knew it anyway. 

 

“Always, Sammy.”

 

“No matter what.”

 

“Even if you lost your balls and turned into a eunuch.”

 

“Or lost my mind and tried to burn the world down.”

 

“I’d have to stop you.”

 

“And I’d love you for it.”

 

“Good. We done with the confessional? Mom was Protestant this Catholic stuff is making me itch.”

“Really.”

 

“Well, she was but no I’m not itching. Sounded cool though, right? Tell me I’m right. And look, you’ve lost your frowny face. Good boy, Sammy.”

 

“Oh shut up, idiot.”

 

“Your idiot.”

 

Sam let Dean bowl him over into the wet grass and just held on.

 

 

 

After there was a lot of stuff to do, a lot of stuff to explain – some of which they didn’t know all the answers to. After, Dean took Sam back to his apartment and did to him what they’d missed the night before.

 

The only thing that scared him now was never seeing Sam again.

 

Dean was all over him, Sam’s borrowed sweater rucked up and his leg pressed between my Dean’s thighs in the familiar position they naturally gravitated to as Dean pushed him down on the bed.

 

They moaned and ground up against each other, their hips dancing to the internal beat of their arousal.

 

Dean started the task of getting them naked while Sam got distracted by the expanse of smooth skin high on his hip, right at that section where a light dusting of pubes bared down into the ‘v’ of his groin.

 

Dean yanked Sam’s sweater off over his head and then made him wiggle and kick to get the pants off his legs. It was worth it when he lay totally naked, shoes and socks kicked to the floor.

 

Dean took a little more care with his own clothing, giving Sam a show as he seductively shimmied his way nude. He was so fucking gorgeous. Smooth clear skin was revealed to him so slowly that Sam’s mind kept getting stuck on each inch of him.

 

“Gonna fuck you so hard,” Sam promised thickly. His cock pointed to the ceiling from its nest of curls, flushed red and dripping.

 

“So here’s the thing,” Dean responded. “I’m clean, I got tested and I haven’t even thought about touching anyone else since this thing started. And I know you go every month. So you gonna let me ride you raw?”

 

Sam swallowed hard. “I want you,” he moaned rubbing a hand up Dean’s chest. His nipples were hard and sensitive. Dean shifted in that little anticipatory way that meant he wanted Sam’s mouth there.

 

“You have me. You want a condom or no, sweetheart?”

 

Sam couldn’t bring himself to say the words so he shook his head instead.

 

And then Dean was on him, forcing his head up the bed so that it gently collided with the headrest, and squeezing himself some space between Sam’s thighs and across his body.

 

Their wet hard cocks met and bumped away. They both hissed in pleasure. Everything felt tight and hot and like every nerve was lit on fire.

 

Sam gathered them back together and pumped their cocks his fist. Dean held onto his hips and helpfully thrust while Sam jacked, letting their fluids run together down his body to pool in his pubes.

 

“Missed this so much,” Dean groaned.

 

“Only been one night, Dean.”

 

“One night too long.”

 

Sam reached back and felt behind Dean’s balls, fingers searching blindly for his hole. They’d done this much last night so Dean’s jerk was anticipatory instead of skidding away. The tips of two fingers rubbed around his rim when Sam found it and he massaged there playing with Dean as Sam tried to hold back from blowing his load too soon.

 

It felt like he’d been hard forever.

 

“Put them in me, Sammy,” Dean whined, too far gone to care if he was begging. “I want you to fuck me.”

 

The rolling motion of their hips bumped them off course a few times even as it provided an extra layer of friction. Sam didn’t have to be told twice. There was the sound of a bottle being opened and then the tell-tale slick of a lube applied to a cock. Before long he was reaching back around and those fingers were back, this time shoving all the way in to his knuckles and stretching Dean around them, making room for himself inside.

 

And then there was no more time for thought because Sam was entering raw, his stiff cock sliding in Dean’s body and splitting his ass a part as they fucked.

 

Sam was the one throwing his head back this time. It was the best fucking thing in the world, Christ.

 

They’d been waiting a long time for this and he could already tell Dean wasn’t going to make it much longer.

 

Sam’s balls slammed into Dean’s ass as he thrust fast and hard, and Dean rocked back down into him every time he pulled out chasing Sam’s cock with his hungry hole.

 

“Fuck, baby, I’m gonna come.” Dean huffed much too soon. He was putting everything in to it, punching little grunts and cries from Sam every time he pushed himself down. He got a hand around his wildly flailing cock and jacked it fast to help himself along. Sam’s hand tangled with him, their fingers intertwined and wrapped around Dean’s dick.

 

Sam groaned and shoved in deep, holding there as still as he could, pressing against his prostate and bringing him off with everything he had.

 

Dean came so hard there were streaks of thick white come sliding down both their heaving bodies. And it was a good thing too because Sam was right behind him, Dean’s clenching hole squeezing the come from him and milking him through his orgasm.

 

When he was done Dean pitched forward and collapsed right on top of all their mess.

 

Breathless, happy, Sam laughed running a hand down his chest and wiping off as much come as he could with his palm. Then he licked it clean seductively while watching Dean’s response.

 

“Oh fuck,” Dean half laughed half groaned. “Stop that. I don’t know if I can get it up again.  I think you broke me on that last one.”

 

“That’s a shame. I had so much more planned for you tonight.”

 

Dean grinned and pulled him in by his hand at the nape of Sam's neck. They tasted like jizz. They tasted like them. “Give me twenty-minutes.” Softly, seriously he added, “And the rest of your life.”

 

Sam smiled and met him the rest of the way; it felt like a promise when they kissed. They really had gotten fucking awesome at it. “Sam Winchester has a nice ring to it.”

 

 

_And that, my friends, is what you call a wrap. Sure, there’s more, lots more. But it’s all the extra bonus stuff that make sequels and cult fiction theater and really sometimes you gotta stop analyzing a good thing, stop holding on to it and running it over and over in your head, before you end up with freakin’ every American Pie movie made after the first (don’t mess with the original, that’s my motto). There was love. Isn’t that enough?_

_Signing out,_

_Chuck Shurley_


End file.
